chat-room posts

Filed under: Audio, Internet, Video, Web

TinyChat adds control options, higher resolution video to instant chat rooms

by Brad Linder Aug 4th 2009

TinyChat is a nifty little service that lets you create multi-user chat rooms at a moment's notice. Last time we checked in on the service, TinyChat had just added the ability to do voice and video chat. Recently the company rolled out a handful of new features, including a few that give you more control over the chat rooms:

Ability to control who can broadcast audio and video
Give admin access to other users with the /oper command
Push to talk feature that helps prevent audio feedback and the sound of people talking on top of one another
Require Twitter mode, which requires users to login with their Twitter credentials (which can make it easier to track who is in the room).

The latest version also includes better video quality. TinyChat says the video quality of the free chat rooms is 4x better than it was.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Tags: chat-room, instant-chat-room, tinychat, video-chat

Filed under: Web services, Social Software

Savor Chat creates chat rooms for Facebook and Twitter contacts

by Jay Hathaway Jul 14th 2009

Most people's Facebook and Twitter contact lists differ drastically from one another, but occasionally, you'll have a reason to get those Facebook and Twitter friends together. Savor Chat is a way to do that, allowing Twitter friends to sign in with OAuth, and Facebook friends to use Facebook Connect. Either way, you're all chatting, and nobody needs to create a new account.

It's nice to see an array of privacy settings when an app requests access to accounts on two major social networks, and Savor Chat delivers. Stealth mode" hides the room on your Facebook feed and keeps it from being indexed by search engines. You can also set a duration to keep the room open, or just open it indefinitely. Rooms can also be turned on or off, or password protected.

My biggest concern about Savor Chat was that chat messages would be posted to Twitter users' accounts to annoy people who aren't in the chat and don't care. You can post your chat messages to Twitter, and even have Savor Chat automatically add a hashtag for your room, but it's not the default option. Savor Chat isn't something I expect to use every day, but when you have a meeting and you don't have time to get everyone on the same network, it could be very handy.

Tags: chat, chat-room, facebook, savor, savor-chat, twitter

Filed under: Web services, web 2.0, Web

Drop.io launches Conference.io real-time collaboration in 2 clicks

by Brad Linder Mar 24th 2009

Last week file sharing service drop.io launched a new real-time feature that allow users to chat with one another at a drop site. Today the company is fleshing out the real-time features by adding support for free conference calls. This means you can set up a virtual space for a conference at a moment's notice, chat with participants, talk on the phone, record or listen to voicemails, and share files all from one location.

Here's how it works. Just hop on over to conference.io and name your chat room. If you want to add any files you can do it here, but you don't have to. Click the drop it button and you're good to go. You can set an administrator password for the room, but again you don't have to.

Conference.io isn't the first service available that lets you set up a web-based chat room in a matter of seconds. But it's the first one that I'm aware of that also supports file uploads, embedding images in chat, and telephone conference calling.

Tags: chat-room, collaboration, conference.io, drop.io

Filed under: Internet, Web services, web 2.0, Web

Create temporary chat rooms with tiny URLs with TinyChat

by Brad Linder Feb 16th 2009

No matter how much you love Twitter, sometimes 140 characters isn't enough to express complex thoughts. That's one reason you see people posting links on Twitter to blogs and other web sites where you can find additional information. A while back we covered TinyPaste, a service that sort of lets you cheat at Twitter by creating a long string of text or links to photos or videos and creating a short URL that you can use to publicize the link on Twitter.

Now the makers of TinyPaste are back with a new service that lets you create an instant chat room, complete with a short URL that you can use to promote the chatroom on Twitter or other sites. TinyChat is about as simple as a build your own web chat page could be. You just click a button to create a room and then enter the room or copy the link to share with others. That's pretty much all there is to it.

You can save a log of the chat as a text file, email it, or post it online. And you can even embed a TinyChat room on your web site.

There aren't a ton of advanced features. You can't upload files to a chat room, for example. But TinyChat has the basics covered. There are a few emoticons and you can perform basic actions with the "/me" command.

Tags: chat-room, tinychat, twitter

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

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