Lingr is a really slick chat service that launched late last year. Lingr lets you create and manage Web chatrooms, combined with some handy technologies to help you keep track of conversations, even when you're not there.
I recently broke down a few of the top apps for chatting, both Web based and software downloads, but Lingr is a straight up chat destination as opposed to a piggy-backing service. Lingr lets you create your own tags for a chat room to make it easily searchable by others. These tags show up in a tag cloud on the front door of Lingr.com, and grow with size based on popularity. Clicking any of these tags will pull down a listing of rooms that contain that tag. It feels a little bit like Flickr.
Each chat room is pretty straightforward with a user list and a chat area. Room owners can even upload their own graphic to brand the room. Everything written is automatically archived, and can be seen by everyone, which is a little more obtrusive than some other casual Web chat apps (like Yaplet which only keeps 20 lines of chat), but if you're used to Gmail-like back-up, Lingr has you covered.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
If you want to keep track of live conversations without keeping an open Lingr window, you can use Lingr Radar, which is a small (~400k) download for Mac OSX and Windows. Radar sits on your taskbar (or command bar on a Mac) and pops up with live messages for whatever chat rooms you've set up to track. It's pretty much like an RSS feed for chatrooms. I wouldn't use this, but it's nice for people who want to keep an eye on a conversation while doing something else on their computer.
To share a Lingr room with others, you can create a Lingr badge. Each badge shows basic room information like the room name, and how many people are currently in the room. Clicking the link takes you straight to the room (see embed below). You can also use your own CSS to match the look and the feel of the badge with your Web site. This is great for blogs.
Lingr is a simple solution for Web chat. I like that it doesn't take over your browser window with a sidebar, and the archiving functions are pretty handy if you're into logging things, or catching up on what's going on in a conversation. I'd like to see some skinning options to customize the look and feel of rooms a little bit, but as it stands it's no frills visual style is clean and useful.
- Yaplet. We featured Yaplet earlier this week. Built by a couple of grad students from Georgia Tech, Yaplet is a no-hassle sidebar that shows up on the right side of your browser with the click of a button. It lets you see who is talking and even caches the last 20 lines of the conversation, so you can see what others were chatting about before you even got there. Read our Yaplet review.
- Itzle is probably one of the coolest visual onsite chat services out there. It gives you an avatar onsite, complete with speech bubbles and emoticons. You even can pick your gender and body features. In case you miss a message with several people visually chatting on a site at once, there's a chat log in the lower-right corner.
- GeeSee feels like an IRC chatroom with tabs. Each tab can be a chat for a Web site, with the potential to be chatting on and inside of several pages at once. TechCrunch's review is here.
- Zpeech floats over the top of your page and lets users comment away. There are some limitations however, such as the need to register and a two-comments-per-minute cap. Think of it as a comment board for Web sites--not just individual posts or stories. Our Zpeech review is here.
- Gabbly, like Zpeech, floats over the page, but looks very similar to an IRC chatroom. What's really cool is the ability to embed a Gabbly chat box on your site and view Gabbly chats as RSS feeds.
Stay tuned for our second half of the list, which features embedded chat modules and browser extension-based chat services.
Interested in chatting with other visitors of a Web site where there's no built-in chat or dedicated forum? Here are some simple chat services to let you get in touch with other site users without having to download or install a single thing.
Yesterday, Josh Lowensohn covered Yaplet, a very new tool for adding real-time chat to any Web site. If for some reason Yaplet doesn't float your boat, you might also want to check out Zpeech.
Add a message board to any site.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Zpeech has a few advantages over Yaplet. First, it's easier to initiate a Zpeech chat on a site. You just type the Zpeech.com URL, a slash, and the target domain. For example: www.zpeech.com/webware.com. Yaplet can also be kicked off by a URL, but the syntax is not as simple. Zpeech is also prettier than Yaplet. The chat window pops up over your page and can be moved around easily. A Yaplet chat can also be opened in a separate window, but when I tried, it opened up a whole new browser tab. Finally, Zpeech conversations are persistent, like message board postings. Yaplet conversations are like IM chats, and there's no record of historical conversations.
But we have three issues with Zpeech. It requires registration before you can chat. That will keep the trolls away and the noise level down in a room, but we think it will also keep casual conversations from starting at all. Second, Yaplet allows you to move from a public chat to a private online conversation with anyone who's in the room. Zpeech chats are all public. Third, Zpeech limits you to making two comments per minute. So much for rapid-fire chats.
As an ad hoc site-based message board (as opposed to chat) Zpeech works fine, and that's what its builders created it for. It's flow-control features and registration requirement keep things sober. That's why we like Yaplet so much more.
Yaplet is a simple idea: Add anonymous, no-registration chat to any Web site. Yaplet is a browser sidebar that can also be popped out as its own browser window. Each site is given its own chat room, and Yaplet caches site conversations for you or others to view, even when no one else is there.
To make the Yaplet experience a little more cohesive you can add an optional bookmarket to your browser. Clicking the bookmarket from any site you're currently on opens up the Yaplet sidebar.
If you're concerned about privacy, private chat is as simple as clicking another chatter's name. There's a simple master list of users that gives you admin controls to ignore or ban other chatters. You're also able to create your own secret rooms, accessible only to those you give a link to, essentially making it its own conference client. Yaplet also has a simple social networking component, keeping track of popular sites visited using Yaplet, plus a list of the top 50 within the last 24 hours.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Yaplet reminds me a little of Me.dium (see coverage here) the way it creates functionality in a Web site that wasn't originally intended. It also reminds me of Planet Minibox, the free shoutbox service I wrote about last month. Yaplet is a nice go-between, offering the core appeal of Me.dium (without a browser plug-in) and the ease of entry you get with Planet Minibox's always-on cached chat room. Not to mention it requires no special code or installation from site creators or visitors.
To try out Yaplet on Webware, click this button:
- prev
- 1
- next
