Meebo, which makes a multinetwork IM Web service, is launching a chat-room service called Rooms tonight. Like the company's other embeddable component, MeeboMe (review), it's simple to embed a Rooms viewer in a blog post or Web page. But Rooms is a full-on, multiparty chat room, which makes it a lot more interesting. MeeboMe, in contrast, allows only one-to-one communication between a Web site visitor and the Meebo user who created it--useful, but not as fun.
Meebo Rooms are full-feature chat rooms with a slick media player in the middle of them.
(Credit: CNET Networks)I've embedded a Rooms widget further down in this post. As you can see, there's more to it than just chat. Rooms makes it easy for users to share media and Web sites. All you have to do to embed a YouTube video or a Flickr photo (or media from Metacafe, Google Video, PhotoBucket, or MySpace) is paste the URL into the chat window, then other users will be able to play media directly, without leaving the chat session.
Room owners can make their forums open to everyone or by invitation only, and they can separately lock down the posting of media and links if they want (I didn't, so please keep your links clean). The media feature of Meebo Rooms reminds me of Kyte.tv (review) and of YouTube's Active Sharing experiment.
Meebo Rooms is not the only embeddable group chat. We've covered several competing products: Weezu, Me.dium, Dai.sy, Chatsum, Yakalike, Planet Minibox, Yackpack, Yaplet, and Zpeech, for example. Meebo Rooms does take advantage of Meebo's slick, Web-based instant message service, though. You can easily invite people into a room by just dragging their name from your buddy list into the room. But Meebo doesn't force the chat/IM integration on you: If you want to invite people via e-mail, that's cool. And people who chat on the service's embeddable widgets don't have to be Meebo users at all.
Meebo Rooms users can also private-message the room's owner, who can then respond back to them in kind. This is a common feature in chat widgets, but I found Rooms' implementation of it exceptionally clear and intuitive.
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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.
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