Embedded Chat

The next level of chat would be to embed it in web sites. This is something we saw start out big about two years ago, with online community divided on the impact. Some were very excited and predicted the next big thing on user involvement in blogs while others questioned if it will really catch on considering that many blogs don’t have too many visitors online at one time. Another factor that supports the latter group is how willing people are to chat with stranger (not buddies) about a blog post. I felt mixed feelings about these applications when I heard about them. Personally I think they are a step in the right direction to grow the community focus of websites, still the only way I could see this work is if your site has considerable number of passionate people online at one time. I find that this is a difficult thing to achieve. After all how many comment on blogs that even have thousands of readers and that too at different times. Can we really gather the mass needed for this; I was skeptical. Another criticism worth mentioning is that chats add no SEO benefits as comments do, which can be important to webmasters, although I feel community must come before SEO. One method that may have more people using chat is not just allow chatting on a specific site but allowing for chatting at different blogs from whatever site you are on. In this way you can gather diverse individuals who are online at same time but viewing different websites.

One thing I have noticed is that these have not really taken off. I have seen very few sites use them. Actually almost all such sites have been tech blogs that use these for testing as I will also do (read on). Seems that opponents of these services where right, they just didn’t fit in. A good example is the much hyped about 3bubbles which launched in early 2006. After I read about it I tried to go to there web site to test it out on my site, surprise surprise! The site was not accessible and it is not accessible to this day. Another trend is whatever place where such applications are running they have very few people online.

I have to confess that after all this I am going ahead with testing them out. First because I want to see for myself what will happen. Secondly maybe just maybe they were not utilized correctly by other webmasters, so I’ll give it my effort. Thirdly I feel that even if just two people got together at a site and discussed there ideas it will be worthwhile experience to the user. After all we also chat with one buddy at a time.

So what are the types of such service providers and what are there core features, similarities, differences and potential.

I won’t go into every other company that popped up and disappeared or disappearing.

Meebo who we talked about earlier as a multi-protocol web based client is providing there own website embedded chat room. Well they have been offering it for some time. I really haven’t used it but heard it needs some technical knowledge as you have to play with some code. But just last week Meebo improved it in a manner that any webmaster can easily embed it like a widget. I think that certainly drops the barrier to adaptation(at least as a test)

Then there is Geesee witch I first used at techcrunch and found the interface pleasing but sadly not many people around to chat with at techcrunch. This offers ability to chat at other chat rooms across the web from whatever site you are in. I tried that and although there are some active chats they were mostly nonsense. There site says 20,000+ chat rooms and 50000+ subscribers, that’s just above 2 users per chat room(or my fears are realized)