* Add chat to your Web site or blog with Chatango
If you are lucky there will come a point when you need to engage with your Web site’s audience in a more real time manner. This could be for social purposes or, in a commercial setting, doing something like answering customer service queries.
While instant messaging is a solution it also presents the problem that using an IM client requires the caller to have access to whatever IM’ing service you’re using and to be able to find and register your IM alias. Here’s a better solution: Add chat to your Web site or blog.
That’s the service that Chatango delivers: A free hosted service or an embeddable widget that provides one-to-one, private chat or group chat.
Sign up requires only your e-mail address, a user name, and a password. You then download the Windows-based MessageCatcher that provides an optional back-end to the chat service. The MessageCatcher isn’t required to interact with your chat users as you, and your users, can also engage with the service via a custom URL generated by Chatango to the hosted version of the chat interface.
Next, you create a profile (optional age, gender, country, “about me” text), select whether your profile is to be public, and add a picture. That’s it. Your custom chat page will now be displayed.
When you are logged in to Chatango and on your customized page you can configure other settings such as whether messages should be e-mailed to you when you’re not logged in, whether others can see your idle time, and so on.
You can search for other Chatango users by various criteria, which include age, gender, and filtered by whether they have photos or using any text that might appear in someone’s “about me” text.
This side of Chatango has an obvious “dating” orientation, and like the whole Chatango Web site it is ad supported in a rather intrusive manner – for example when you send people to your custom URL there are not only Google ads down the right hand side of the page but there is also an annoyingly large ad for match.com at the lower left pushing the obvious “hook up with a cute girl” pitch.
I tried out the private and group chat widgets on my Web server and I was impressed – they not only work well, but used in this manner there are no ads displayed! Chatango also provides automatic addition of its widgets to various social networking services including MySpace, Xanga, and Friendster.
If Chatango also linked to the major IM services such as AIM it would be in a league of its own, but even so, as it is, Chatango is a solid, useful service that I plan to use extensively for some new projects.
