Library clips :: June

June 28, 2006

Blog chats

The other day I posted on ChatCreator where you can create an instant private chat room, something similar but quicker than Conversate.

In the post I also explained that you can do a similar thing with Gabbly, only it is not private…Gabbly chat revolves around a webpage. Just go to any webpage and prepend it with gabbly.com/
eg. http://gabbly.com/www.google.com…or hit the Gabbly bookmarklet to chat about the page you are on.
The difference here is that you are not initiating a chat, the door is always open at that URL, who ever happens to be at the the Gabblified version of that URL can chat.

Chat for blog posts

I’m also interested in chat for blog posts, along the same lines as chat for Gmail. If you have an email and the person who sent it to you also uses Gmail, then you can reply to that email by Chat…and that chat will be threaded with the email.

Not sure how to enable people to create a private chat for each blog post using a footer button for ChatCreator, but I have done it for Conversate, Gabbly and 3bubbles.

Out of all of these 3bubbles sounds the most focused on blog post chat, but Gabbly also has its advantages.

Gabbly allows you to embed a chat box on your blog, or as I have done in the footer of every blog post is to allow people to chat about that blog post with one click. If more than one person has clicked on the Gabbly button on the blog post then they can chat, it’s that easy…that chatbox will display how many Gabbers are online.

Same goes with 3bubbles, at the footer of each blog post is a link to “Live Chat” followed by a number that denotes how many people are currently chatting about that blog post.
To join a chat or see the chat history for a blog post, just click on the link and a pop-up box will appear.

Differences

Gabbly has an RSS feed for each URL chat…each URL has an archive of the chat, I guess once the box fills up it will re-fresh itself…check the RSS feed to see the history.

Now this is all good but I can’t subscribe to the chat RSS feed of every blog post on my blog, there has to be some way I can be notified if there is a chat taking place at any URL in my blog.
This is essential, if I’m aware people are chatting at one of my blog posts I can join in…but I guess Gabbly isn’t set up especially for blog posts.

3bubbles will soon develop more robust features for blog post chat, but at the moment their prime directive is targeting online communities.

3bubbles lack an RSS feed for each chat (it is coming soon), in the meantime there is a 3rd party hack called ChatWatcher to keep you in the loop, still not the solution to be notified of chats happening on all your blog posts via one feed.

If they provided feeds you could also choose to re-syndicate the chat spliced feed (from all the chat RSS feeds of all your blog posts) on the sidebar of your blog…just like latest posts, and latest comments.

The good thing about 3bubbles is that you create an account, here there is a list of chats for every blog post, clicking on a chat for a blog post will display the chat archive.

Another thing, if I myself come across another blog that uses 3bubbles, I may enter my registered nickname and take part in the conversation, my account will store a log for my conversations elsewhere (this may be coming soon).
NOTE: I can choose to chat anonymously, but then this will not be stored in my log.

Social ecosystem

The bigger picture for 3bubbles may be similar to CoComments…social sharing and discovery of where you have chatted.

Register and have 2 separate streams; chats you own, chats elsewhere…imagine an RSS feed for each user, someone can grab my RSS feed and see where I’ve been chatting.
Even more, I could describe my chats with tags, and so could all other 3bubbles users, then you can follow a chat tag eg. show me chats from all users (or just one user) about “soccer”.

Similar to CoComments the success of this is based on people registering with 3bubbles and also blogs implementing 3bubbles.
To create a chat ecosystem for blog posts everyone needs to be registered with 3bubbles (chatting anonymously won’t help in the social part of the system eg. discover chats by a user, by a tag, etc…), this is just the same with people having to register with CoComments in creating a social blog comments ecosystem.

The other key to make CoComments work is that all blog platforms have to be compliant with the CoComments system…this is just a matter of time.
This way when a CoCommenter leaves a comment it appears on the blog post and at the CoComments website similtaneously.

The obstacle for 3bubbles is that blogs don’t already have a chat section, unlike most blogs having a comments section. CoComments just rides on the comments section already present in blogs, but 3bubbles can’t do this as there is no chat section to ride on. So a big part of 3bubbles is to get bloggers to put the two lines of javascript in their post template…it just won’t happen in a big way.
If this was all in place, then like CoComments, a chat would appear in the blog post and at the 3bubbles website similtaneously.

Then we could search the blogosphere in posts, in audio posts (podcasts), posts by tags/categories, for blogs, in comments, in chats, etc…

I mentioned the obstacle for 3bubbles is that all blogs would have to physically code their post template to include a chat section for each blog post…Gabbly works around this, as we know with Gabbly there is no implementation as you can chat about any blog post on-the-fly by simply pre-pending the URL, the blog owner may not even know someone is chatting about their blog post, so this may be the key.

The downside is how do people know that you can chat about a blog post, again blog owners would still need to place a button on the blog post footer so people know they can chat about the blog post, or view the chat history of the blog post. If you already know about Gabbly you may use the bookmarklet, and simply click the bookmarklet for the page you are on to enable chat, but then not all people are Gabbers.

3bubbles feedback

The only thing missing is perhaps an email notification that someone is chatting on one of your blog posts, you need to be notified somehow. Email maybe sounds more probable, since you have an account the system could notify you that something is taking place at one of the chat URL’s you own.
NOTE: Chat URL’s I own refers to all my blog posts.
Not sure if the same thing could be achieved with a private RSS feed.

NOTE: an RSS feed to notify you someone is chatting on one of your blog posts is different to an RSS feed for every blog post. Having an RSS version of the content from every chat from your blog posts enables you to re-syndicate it or put it in an RSS Reader or feed grazer, etc…

A winning feature of 3bubbles is that you are able to point to a public URL of a blog chat (this is handy as the pop-up box for your blog chats doesn’t have a URL).
Here’s the example, just click on the title (the date) to get a permalink…also every line in the chat has its own unique URL.
The current stream shows the chat for a time period, on the right are links to earlier time periods.

I often point to unique URL’s of comments left in my blog posts, now I could point to a line in a chat for a given blog post…now that’s granular.

[ADDED: Mobber is yet another similar tool, not sure if it is sophisticated as 3bubbles]

[ADDED: itzle is similar to Gabbly]

Ideas

I like Erik Schwartz’s mention about Live Chat events…perhaps even chatcasting, whatever that means.

I also like Marlun’s mention of blog posts sharing chats…kind of like what Technorati does for blog posts.

I like the idea of the former ajchat in creating a private chat then allowing you to embed or include it somehow in your blog post.
This is like ChatCreator but allowing you to include it for your domain, each chat someone creates has just added another webpage to your domain, you can then see a list of past chats and click on one to view it…examples.

More chat

Gabbly
3bubbles
Mobber
ChatCreator
Conversate
Ajchat
itzle
Lace
Chatango
Zonk Board
Tag-Board
Hive7
Chat’N Search…embed a chat box on your blog, also people searching for the same keyword at a search engine can chat.
Congress
AJAX Shoutbox…this has been modified, from the blog post: “The difference though is that instead of having each post be its own chat, they’re all the same chat - but when you say something, your message has a link back to the page you were reading. I’m experimenting - I’m not sure if that will add value or not, but I thought it’d be neat. “
Newsvine chat for all items
Blogchat
cbox
chat trick
Userplane - Webmessenger, Userlist
Bunchball
Chatsum…from the website: “Chatsum is a FREE add-on for your web browser that lets you chat with all the other Chatsum users that are looking at the same website as you.”
Bravenet - live chat
Webmobs
Virtual Presence
May We Help - free chat
boldchat
LIVEperson - live chat
kayako - live response
yakalike (Similar to chatsum)