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Welcome to the lobby wiki!
What is Lobby? Lobby is a platform which allows games to register themselves on a central server. After registration other users of the game can get a list of running games and connect directly to the game host computer.
The two main advantages of Lobby are the ease of create client-server connected games and the lack of infrastructure required to run these games.
Creating multiplayer games requires a fair bit of common code. You have to create a lobby where people can discover games and a means of connecting clients to games. There are also many ways to connect clients to servers. Game developers shouldn't have to worry about the means of connecting clients, just what data to send to server / client.
Why create a platform for game hosts to accept direct client connections? Running the infrastructure for many games requires expensive servers and internet connections. By allowing servers to run peer to peer, developers can easily launch multiplayer games that can grow to large numbers of users.
Playing games on lobby is simple. You can browse the games list and click on a game to connect to. Alternately, you can connect to a game specific lobby.
You can serve a game by installing the Chrome Web Store version of the game. The game listens on a TCP port of your choosing. You'll have to forward this port to your computer if you're behind a router and want others to be able to connect to your game over the internet.
Lobby has a simple API which will be linked to from here. Implement the lobby API and you should be able to use the latest version of the lobby code in your game.
The design page describes the overall design of lobby. If you are interested in working on lobby, this page will give you an idea how the system works.