Create a disposable chat room with ChatMaker

Filed under: Internet, Web services, web 2.0

Create a disposable chat room with ChatMaker

by Brad Linder Jan 21st 2008

Ever need to organize a group chat with a bunch of people who have never heard of IRC and can't seem to agree on a common IM client? ChatMaker makes it easy to set up a temporary web-based chatroom which you can discard when you're done. How easy? All you have to do is name your room and click the "Go" button. Seriously, that's it.

There's no registration required. In fact, there's not even an option to create an account, which means that when you login to a chat room you'll have an unwieldy name like Guest 1817. But you can easily change your name using the IRC-like /nick command. You can also designate actions by typing /me, but that's about it for the IRC commands.

ChatMaker also supports some basic HTML commands like <a> for providing a hyperlink, <i> for italics, and <strong> for bold. While ChatMaker probably isn't going to win any awards for its interface, the service could be the easiest we've ever seen for setting up a multi-user chatroom.

[via makeuseof]

Tags: chat-room, ChatMaker, IM

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Big John said 8:21PM on 1-21-2008

I'm not seeing anything to make a room... just a login page.

Brad Linder said 8:24PM on 1-21-2008

Sorry about that, I had a typo in the URL. It should point to chatmaker.net, not chatmaker.com.

Big John said 8:38PM on 1-21-2008

No problems, thanks for the fix! Didn't notice the difference myself :-P

Big John said 11:41PM on 1-21-2008

Just tried this. I'm a member of some forums that are politically active, so we decided to give it a spin to talk about tonight's Democratic primaries live. After about 10 users it got really sluggish. Good for small groups, bad for medium or large groups.

Chris Brogan... said 11:54PM on 1-21-2008

I dragged about 60 or so people into a room from Twitter, and it performed admirably. We couldn't get it to crash under that number o' folks. Lots of good response from people.

One suggestion for usability: make it *really* explicit how one changes their username/nickname. I got it right off, but lots of folks balked at that early on, so we spent lots of cycles telling newcomers what to do.

Otherwise, nifty, easy, and cool.

masa said 8:55AM on 1-22-2008

Thanks for this application, it' s interesting ;)

joey said 10:45AM on 1-31-2008

Yo we got to chat homies. Im out.

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