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.
My Firefox does not like Gabbly much.
After my initial “hello people” I have been unable to reconnect. Worse, it froze Firefox. :(
i’ve not had heaps of luck either – they got to the top of digg apparently and it’s slowed things down :-)
And Gabbly doesn’t like Opera either – which I imagine it declares if I was to go to their site rather than simply click on your chat room. I’ll try another time with IE
Hey its cool especially for the ones who have blogging as full time profession
it’s fun – but light on the features I’ll be wanting.
For those who I chatted to today in it – thanks for stopping by. I’m off for dinner now but will come back again later.
great stuff there! need more features to make it rocks.
Might make my work day go quicker :)
Nice app. I wouldn’t want it on my site for the reasons stated above, but it was fun chatting with pashley for a little while. I browsed away from the page for a few second and came back to see a bunch of my messages at the end didn’t make it though. Hopefully it works better when digg is not hitting it.
I played with Gabbly a bit yesterday and here are a few things:
“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?”
It’s still your page – it just puts it in a frame. There is a gabbly frame and your page in a frame. It’s still your page and your content.
“there’s no archives of conversation – this would be useful although I’m not sure if it’d be practical.”
There is an RSS feed fro each chat. You can subscribe to the RSS feed in something like Bloglines and use that as a way to archive it. Not practical for every page on your site, but it would work for your “front page” chat.
“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.”
If you are using Firefox (and if you aren’t, why not?) you can simply right-click in the page and choose “This frame->Show only this frame”
“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.”
There is a dock feature that will dock the chat in the side or bottom of the browser. Not quite the same though. I’d play with it right now a bit more but their site is SWAMPED and I can’t get a chat going anywhere.
Also, you can embed the chat into a single page on your site. I played around with it and put one here (put didn’t link to it):
http://candyaddict.com/blog/chat
I thought about putting a slim one in my right-hand column, so readers could chat with other users on the site, but I would have to make the width of the chat 200px and it’s not very functional at 200px.
Brian
Hi,
I am trying to test it as well.
I embeded in my website http://www.nepalisite.com/chat
Lets see how it goes.
[…] At first I read about Gabbly at SiliconBeat, then I tested it at Problogger. And I must say that Gabbly was something I really enjoyed. […]
I tried it only today… lot after all of you guys up there.
I see GREAT applications for this in education. To me it is equivalent to the “Office Hours” of a college professor ( I am one), where you “sit” at your blog and students come to ask you questions.
I am a user (full disclosure: AND AGENT) for Marratech (www.marratech.com), and of course Marratech is a full-feature virtual classroom… but if you want to respond to “quickies”, Gabbly could work fine!
AND: there is no reason you could not have both!… student “comes” to the blog to chat… if question requires audio, video and whiteboard to answer, you give him through Gabbly the username and password he needs to enter Marratech.
We do have a close button and we are working on chat moderation.
You should check out our widgets
I really need help removing the Gabbly chat box from my browser. It is automatically attaching to every link I open up! Do you know if there’s anyway to remove it for good?
Thanks for any advice in advance.
Viv
I use to use gabbly quite a bit, but i found out to become invisible (off the list) so i was unmuteable. I was messin with someone for a second and was IP banned now i can’t get on any gabbly on any website. For anyone who cares to become invisble, while entering and its laoding the chat window type alot of letters/lines extremly fast(may take a few trys).
is there a program that tracks ip addressed for gabbly users? there are just so many impostors in the site where we use gabbly as the chat box….appreciate the help