Just stumbled upon this interesting service called Gabbly that allows you to add a chat room to any page.
I’m going to hang out in one for ProBlogger for the next little while. Come chat with me at http://gabbly.com/problogger.net
update: having used it now for a few hours my initial reflections are:
- It reminds me of my old IRC chat days although with less features (ie no private chats, whois, actions etc)
- it’s a nice little application and I can see some uses for it. Blogs with a lot of traffic might even like to leave links at the end of posts to a chat room for discussion of the post. I’m sure someone will develop a plugin for this.
- there’s no moderation so you’ve got no way of controlling what goes in on a chat that is linked to your own pages. In fact anyone can start a chat on any of your pages which is a little freaky.
- I’m not sure what I think about a page being served on gabbly.com that has my ads on it. Is this against AdSense TOS for instance?
- Things get a little messy when there’s a lot of people in the room – but this happens in most chat applications
- there’s no archives of conversation – this would be useful although I’m not sure if it’d be practical.
- I can see chat spammers as loving this – as they do with many chat mediums
- Almost every user who left had problems doing so as there is no ‘close’ button and you have to exit the browser (or the tab you’re in if you’re using tabbed browsing) to leave the conversation.
- I found having the chat window over the page annoying in the end. I’d love to have continued chatting in another window to allow me to keep surfing. I guess I could run two windows at once.
Feel free to add your own initial impressions of Gabbly in comments below.
