In the past few months I've
seen no fewer than four services that let you chat in real time with people visiting the same web site as you. Most of
them, I'm sorry to say, suck. Either they have crappy interfaces, require every user to install an extension or other
software, or just don't work very well.
Gabbly is a breath of fresh air. For starters,
it requires zero setup--just put the address of the target site after gabbly.com/, e.g.
gabbly.com/downloadsquad.com--making it super-easy to get other people
to join your chat (just send them the URL). Gabbly is easy to use and looks good, and it has a variety of docking
options to keep it out of your way. Behind the scenes, it works by capturing the target web site in a frame, which has
some drawbacks, but apart from that Gabbly is great for informal real-time chat. It even has built-in RSS feeds. For
web site owners there's also a Gabbly component that you can embed in any of your pages by simply copying and pasting a
bit of code into your pages. At the moment Gabbly is under the heavy load of the Digg effect, but it's definitely worth
checking out if you can.
Tags: ajax, chat, gabbly, shoutbox
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Comments
2
Subscribe to commentsdancnpeteMar 13th 2006 9:31PM
okay, let me see if I've got this right, I'm on a web page I find something cool, so I go to my chat client and tell my friends to check it out... and then I chat through the web page....
Does anybody, see something possibly off here
FabianMar 14th 2006 6:12AM
You just don't get the purpose ^^
It's more like a community building tool. You use it on a website to provide a means for your readers interactions. You know, somehow not all webpage are only read by people who knwo each other already. Say how would you send me a message from your chat client if you wanted to discuss about this newspost with me?
On the other hand we *could* chat with that service. Think about it, it actually does have its legitimate uses ;-)