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Create Disposable Chat Rooms with ChatMaker
Posted by Kevin Purdy at 2:00 AM on January 22, 2008
Instant messaging and email are great ways to quickly get ideas and notices across quickly to co-workers, but sometimes an actual, real-time chat session can save you time on replies and confusion. ChatMaker, a free web chat application, instantly creates online chat rooms after you type in the name for one. Inviting others into the chat is as simple as sending them a human-readable URL, and nobody has to sign up or answer an invitation email. The chat interface is simple and familiar, but you don't get as much flexibility and control as with more old-school solutions like Internet Relay Chat. ChatMaker is a free web service, no sign-up required. For more group chat options, check out Google Talk and the (very) similar ChatCreator.
Tags: chat | communication | top | web application | web applications
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
There are currently no AU comments for this post.
mcnee
Posted 9:33 AM 22/1/08
FlashChat is a great program, and only costs $5. I use it for a site I run and regularly have 40-50 people in there per night. It really doesn't use that much bandwidth, it is just sending text, what it does use is server processor resources, specifically on the database side.
They've been working on a caching option that will help that, but unless you've got a dedicated (or at least dedicated virtual server), I wouldn't try running it more than once in awhile, or keep it at a max of 8-10 people at any given time.
mcnee
MyEasyTV
Posted 9:33 AM 22/1/08
It's neat I guess but things like this have existed for quite a while. Check out TuFat's FlashChat which is similar but allows you to deploy an unlimited amount of chat rooms and allows filesharing but of course it operates via http so it uses the servers bandwidth.
MyEasyTV
DasLife
Posted 9:33 AM 22/1/08
If you so happen to create a room that someone else could stumble upon later on, AFTER YOU HAVE ENDED YOUR CHAT, your conversation history will be there. SO, much caution needed indeed.
DasLife
BohRev
Posted 9:33 AM 22/1/08
Looks like in its current incarnation, ChatMaker is not private, but they hope to add options for privacy later. For now, giving your chat window a nonsensical name would probably keep anyone from stumbling onto it, but posting email addresses, phone numbers or your gameplan for dominating the marketplace might not be advisable. ;)
BohRev
crazylady
Posted 10:10 PM 21/1/08
@mcnee: what's wrong with irc?
crazylady
n3wjack
Posted 4:11 AM 22/1/08
There's nothing wrong with IRC except:
- it's hard to access through a firewall
- n00bz don't know how to operate it
Just did a Google search and a few of these chatroom turn up in the results already. Quite interesting, and yet another reason why you should mind your privacy in a chatroom :)
Chances of being indexed while the chat is active are slim I suppose, but still...
n3wjack
extraface
Posted 3:34 AM 23/1/08
WebChattr.com is a nicer experience IMHO and works really well on the iPhone. During the most recent Steve Jobs keynote, it held a couple hundred people all blabbing at once and didn't seem to have scaling problems. It allows the creation of a new room just by creating a new URL instead of having to go through the front door of the site itself, and you can pretty smoothly occupy more than one room at once. You can also target the same room from multiple embed windows, so more than one site can all feed into the same chat room.
One mild annoyance I'm hoping gets corrected in the next rev is the ability to turn off audio cues.
extraface
crazylady
Posted 1:36 PM 22/1/08
@n3wjack: there are other ways to get past those limitations, especially for people unable to "figure it out", e.g. web interfaces that work over port 80. I've used plenty of those (like ircatwork.com) from all sorts of places to get on irc when I normally couldn't.
crazylady