I wonder is this ad model legal? Have you duscussed it with google?

https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms says:
“5. Prohibited Uses:……(v) display any Ad(s), Link(s), or Referral Button(s) on any error page, on any registration or “thank you” page (e.g., a page that thanks a user after he/she has registered with the applicable Web site), on any chat page,…..”

Our goal now is to get Geesee deployed on some ammount of sites so it’s “working” (enough chatters are in) and then test, test, test, fix, improve, test

I actually liked the chat, and thought it was pretty good. In fact I think gamers will like it also, and Ive been looking into embeded chat for our site (as well as VOIP but I STILL cant find anything decent) for a bit, I’m going to talk to my partner and see if we can throw this in for release.

Quick question: Can the chat box be reskinned on our end to be more aligned with our sites look/feel?

Revenue model - so far it’s showing up to be a great choice. I don’t get why would google adsense not work in chatting systems. I’d say that exact opposite is true. The click on the ad in chat is the same as on any other site. Also I’ve already got 2 emails from ad network systems looking for cooperation (it’s only 3rd day of the beta and we don’t have any users yet)

Florian - great idea with the blocking of users, it would be nice if a user can simply turn off messages from other users that he don’t like or annoy him by simple click in the user list. We should definetelly give it some thoughts.

Thanks for comments.

This screen cap of an actual chat on TechCrunch shows why Gesee really needs to think out their nickname settings.
I doubt that ‘Michael Arrington’ as pictured here is really planning on shutting down TechCrunch, not to mention doing a spee…

I remember looking endlessly for a chat app. 4 my site and I I couldn’t quite find it…

I had to settle for something else (which I like) but still…

The “IM in a browser window” plays (like Meebo) I get — at least from a user value prop. These are people who already use IM to communicate with a circle of friends, much different than connecting to misc users across the Web.

Unless it’s a customer support scenario, seems to me that “strangers connecting by chat” plays really don’t offer much more than novelty.

Let’s not forget, chatting has been around for a long time. However, ICQ was not able to monetize it; IRC was not able to monetize it; Yahoo! and so many other companies, since then, have not been able to monetize it. I expect Web 2.0 companies to realize that advertising systems (especially Google adsense) does not make money in chatting softwares.

Milan, you are better off selling the service to the premium users (or to webhosts that host your service, ie TC). Web applications as a service worked well for JotSpot, Joel and 31Signals. That, to me, seems to be the only business model you can actually earn a few bucks from. Take care,
Jawad

Regardless, tonight is the first night a lot of TechCrunch readers will have had a direct, realtime conversation with *other* fellow TechCrunch readers … and that definitely deserves some merit.