- 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.
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