Google Chatback Rocks and Rolls

March 7, 2008 by Stephen Leave a Comment

Google added a nifty feature to their arsenal of sorta-world-taking-over products the other day (while I was away) – chatback. This lets us webby-writing people add a special chat balloon to our pages which lets random strangers google-talk with us. So I added it to my sites and actually had a productive use for it today! But not all is bunnies and flowers…

Here’s what the balloon looks like:

Cool, eh? Except…

The balloon itself is non-functional – it’s just an icon to click on
You have to have Flash 8 installed
The actual chat sessions are a little funky, and the guest can claim to be whoever they want
(Worst of all) the chats are not saved like every other google talk session

I like it ok. I’ll leave it on (after all, I did make a MediaWiki extension and WordPress plugin/widget for it) but I’m not sure it’ll be much more than an occasional distraction. And I hope Frederic isn’t right about the potential for multitudes of unwanted conversations!

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