Area Managers could work better as a team, if we were able to chat on-line with other Area Managers, in our city, when we both are working on the maps. In Mpls/St Paul, we already have a small group that keeps pretty well in touch via email and forum, but that's delayed and near-real time at best.

I picture that you'ld do something like... take the Ping code from the Waze client and move it into Cartouche. To protect privacy, could you pull the 'friends' that each of us keep in our Waze email account and (if the other guy has me on his friend list) then let us ping each other in Cartouche and chat. Ohterwise, no contact.

Give us an option on the layers panel to pop up a window to show which friends might be on-line in Cartouche and ping them from the pop up window to start a chat.

Couple ideas for added features.

1. could you expand the text window like other IM programs so the conversation is shared and it scrolls as new comments are made (vs ping's one shot message) ? Maybe there's some GNU/Open Source codebase you could leverage. http://osswin.sourceforge.net/#instant

2. If this Waze IM function was available, I expect we'd be sending Permlinks back and forth, so it would be great, when I'm in a Cartouche Chat and I click Permalink, it goes directly into the chat client window so I can send it to the other guy. Hope that makes sense.

Also, if you needed to use the current waze ping code base, I am unsure what the text window size limits might be, so would be good to have it big enough to handle a good conversation (yes, I know I am verbose) plus a Permlink paste.

Thanks for Listening
R Ted Wolfe