The Six Biggest New Ideas In Chat

November 24th, 2006 at 12:27 am

http://gabbly.com/techcrunch.com

Here is another one to consider Just, AWESOME

November 24th, 2006 at 12:56 am

I think you should have talk about Stickam also. I know it isn’t exactly a “web 2.0″ start-up but they their job very well in video/voice chat, even with big rooms.

November 24th, 2006 at 1:17 am

Great Ideas.

November 24th, 2006 at 1:38 am

the minds and imaginations of authors as long as there has been written …

November 24th, 2006 at 2:40 am

Not mentioned in your article are the many companies offering proactive web chats with visitors to their web shops.

Scenario: someone visits your online shop, appears to be ready to purchase, but breaks off from purchasing for some reason. A web chat operator then PUSHES a chat to this potential customer, attempting to persuade him to buy, and answering any questions making him hesitant to purchase.

This is an exciting sales channel not given much attention at the present time. Nonetheless, it IS currently being used by a lot of enterprise companies doing business online.

November 24th, 2006 at 3:28 am

I would have said ‘SEVEN biggest new ideas in chat’ as I feel the most innovative idea of all to do with instant messaging has been omitted: intelligent chat bots. This reperesents the most fascinating area of IM - an automated robot with whom you can converse in natural language and depending on which ‘bot’ you use - can offer you a number of services like news, rss feeds, and content integration with flights and amazon to name a few. chat@insidemessenger.com offers the richest and most innovative set of services together with a friendly natural language buddy. There are plenty others out there, but I feel this area of instant messaging deserves a mention don’t you? The technology of these IM bots is rapidly advancing and are bound to make a profound impact on our online habits in the near future.

November 24th, 2006 at 4:50 am

:-)))

see this talk-deal-pay service http://www.siteheart.com

November 24th, 2006 at 6:03 am

I didnt find thing that i need…
[url=http://yahoo.com]yahoo[/url]

November 24th, 2006 at 7:44 am

I have been using Meebo since it launched. I gotta say those guys did a very nice job. I have never used eBuddy but will definitely check it out.

November 24th, 2006 at 8:28 am

Dont forget the chat is going to intergrated into the latest products for the gnome project.

Telepathy allows for all applications to share a single instant messaging and VoIP interface.

http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/

This then leads to extensions like abiword and inkscape that can do shared documents using IM as the transport.

http://uwog.net/news/?p=29
http://www.thelinuxlink.net/oldblog/?postid=335

So you want sombody to add something to your document give them a shout on your VoIP connection and then click on the share document and you can edit the document together.

November 24th, 2006 at 8:56 am

I agree with Mike, certainly one of the biggest developments in chat is intelligent IMBots.

I’m sure this will be the next generation of chat startups to be seen on TechCrunch.

For anyone interested in some technology for this check out http://www.importal.org/

“Easy, rapid development of applications (client and server) that provide live and ubiquitous access to content, systems and people; using secure, instant messaging protocols (XMPP).”

November 24th, 2006 at 10:18 am

IM is likely one of the three most popular communication applications on your computer/pda today - along with Email and a web browser.

The new ideas in chat are around the leveraging of key differentiators of IM as infrastructure rather than as an application. I say new ideas, but I really mean is new recognition of the real power of IM - beyond chat.

Traditional IM/Chat has been about people communicating with other people - the real/enduring money (*) is in integrating IM with work flow - i.e Applications chatting with people, and people chatting with applications.

* Presence, Availability and Location tracking

This provides an application the ability to find the right person at the right time and assign tasks to them based on their real-time status. Examples are as simple as finding an expert user for e-learning, or assigning a field service request to the nearest technician.

A variant of this is “Managed person to person communication” - you wish to converse with the first “available” person who fits a skill or role - as in a call center/help desk environment

*Bi-directional Closed-loop Communication

Unlike email or the traditional web - IM provides an opportunity for the recipient to interact in real-time with the message just received. If the sender is an application, decisions can be used to speed up work flow. We have developed IM as a channel for “humans in the loop” application for over 6 years.

*Latency

IM is practically the fastest way to notify someone of the occurrence of an event. Unlike a web page, where you have to clairvoyant to know if new information has been made available, or email which can be store and forward - IM is delivered with sub second latency to a user that is online.

I note the recent spate of interest in RSS as the “in-box for the web” and its use as a notification technology. Compared to the use of IM for the same task (ask us for a demo), RSS might soon be termed “Really Slow Syndication”

Web reduce delays from weeks to days, Email and RSS from days to hours and minutes, while IM reduce it from minutes to seconds. If that kind of advantage matters, check out http://www.vayusphere.com

–pushpendra

Pushpendra Mohta
Vayusphere

November 24th, 2006 at 11:05 am

google talk is good for interoperation
try talking to someone from livejournals instant messenger (its jabber based)
from gtalk
it works

November 24th, 2006 at 11:39 am

Carl,

WebEx has, through a partnership with AIM called AIM Pro. (http://aimpro.premiumservices.aol.com/).

As for the rest of the article, I agree that there’s a lot going on in the space. It’s like mail before GMail came out; a lot of people thought that the innovation was over, but there’s still a lot of life left in this medium.

For example, if you haven’t seen what we’re doing over with AIM recently, come check it out. AIM 6 has location, and on the developer site (developer.aim.com), you can get access to the new Web IM tools to embed chat and buddy lists on your own web pages. Or, build your own bots and make them available to any AIM user. Pretty cool stuff.

Great post and agree that it’s nice to see the analysis here.

November 24th, 2006 at 12:51 pm

Nick, Good assessment of the chat-sphere so far. Although our goal at Me.dium is much broader than chat, chat is certainly an important part of the mix. If any of your readers would like to try it out, they can download Me.dium with the following invite code: TC2006ME (all caps).

Thanks again for the mention.

November 24th, 2006 at 1:58 pm

Nick,

With due respect, technically speaking, none of the companies listed under #1 “interoperability” provide IM interoperability.

Interoperability on the network level is when I call your phone number (with Cingular) from my phone (which is with Verison).

Gaim, Trillian and Jabber family clients ask you to create new accounts on foreign networks before you could chat on those networks. An equivalent of you getting a brand new phone number with Verizon so that you and I could talk.

Just because one could get an “all-in-one” instant messenger AND create 5 instant messaging accounts on AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, MSN and Jabber/Google does not make that instant messenger “interoperable”.

November 24th, 2006 at 4:45 pm

This incircles idea “ROCKS”!!!!!!!!

November 24th, 2006 at 5:01 pm

It seems to already be overrun with annoying trolls. Web chat sounds great, but every time I’ve seen it in real life, the outcome is bad…

November 24th, 2006 at 9:03 pm

Mike’s idea about Intelligent Chat Robots seems promising. How far are we from really useful Intelligent Chat Robots?

November 24th, 2006 at 11:13 pm

TRILLIAN FTMFW it is the best thing out there, and the pro version makes it that much more, i use it for everything from skype to msn, and with the skinning and plugins features the possibilities are endless

November 25th, 2006 at 1:37 am

1. Interop between systems is over-stated and still a major mess. And it’s now got an additional level of complexity that we need voice and video interop as well as chat. Googletalk’s Libjingle announcement from a year ago should have helped here but it hasn’t come to anything.

2. Group chat is re-inventing IRC. It’s yet another few-to-few communication mechanism but now almost real time. And along with Group Chat, group voice either as few-to-few conference calls or one-to-many broadcast like Skypecasts.

3. Most of the IM systems have an API. But there are surprisingly few IM-Web mashups. Why is that?

November 25th, 2006 at 8:05 am

heres another one which I developed out of interest. Matrix can convert any web site into a community and can connect people browsing that site together globally. Check out http://www.matrixconnects.com

November 25th, 2006 at 8:36 am

Google Talk users can make calls to telephones, MSN and SIP phones thru public services like http://www.gtalk2voip.com

November 25th, 2006 at 1:08 pm

Havent you all wasted enough time on chat. Sure, I know IM has its place but most of you abuse it and dont know your limits. The bigest idea in chat should be that people realize what a time waster it is and how much it interrups anyone’s basic focus.

November 25th, 2006 at 1:57 pm

Nick, great write-up. Thanks for the mention of Others Online — we are flattered.

And thanks to all who’ve downloaded our current beta release. Lots going on here, and we’re not quite ready for primetime yet, but we look forward to a proper launch and a much more complete user experience next quarter.

November 25th, 2006 at 9:06 pm

Nice summary on IM technology. I am glad about the interoperability, I look forward to the day when IM is based on program feature preference rather than user base.

November 26th, 2006 at 9:53 am

What is the widget that is embedded in this post? Is it a TechCrunch-customized MeeboMe? I thought that MeeboMe only allowed the administrator to communicate with visitors. Does anyone know? Am I missing something obvious?

November 27th, 2006 at 3:09 am

Interoperability is (obviously) the way forward and once the ‘brand names’ fully realise this, it will make everyone’s life a lot easier!

November 27th, 2006 at 9:32 am

someone mentioned intelligent chat bots….using natural language techniques…..a great example of that is spleak created by IMT labs….its available only on MSN at this point….but pretty cool stuff….I think the website is spleak.com…..

November 27th, 2006 at 10:38 am

To answer one of your other reader’s questions, if you need secure enterprise group chat you need to look at a solution such as Parlano MindAlign. There is a growing trend for enterprises to manage IM and Chat as enterprise applications that supplement email. It is very difficult for most enterprises to accomplish this with a consumer-oriented chat solution because they do not conform to existing enterprise identity management, security, or virus prevention approaches. While we aren’t focused on the consumer model, we have been around since the mid-90’s when we developed persistent group chat rooms (contextual chat as you refer to it) that are secure and enable users to participate in hundreds of ongoing conversations without becoming overloaded or creating information silos.

We also introduced MindAlign for LCS that adds persistent group chat to Microsoft’s Live Communications Server and utilizes the SIP/SIMPLE protocol so it can integrate with an organization’s unified communications solutions. It is a proven solution in use by the many of the world’s largest enterprises and demonstrates the value of adding group chat on top of an existing IM/presence infrastructure.

I’d also suggest a seventh key trend for your list: Federated Group Chat.

Various standards allow secure federation between enterprise IM and public network IM networks, but until now they have not supported federated *group* chat. With our upcoming release, MindAlign will allow enterprises to create shared chat rooms “behind the firewall” so their employees can conduct ongoing dialogue with trusted external parties in a managed environment utilizing their existing security infrastructure. Federated group chat offers the accessibility benefits of a hosted solution but with all the security and manageability that enterprises demand. This won’t necessarily apply to many consumer-oriented solutions, but the ones that have aspirations to be used by enterprises will need to figure out how to support federated users without requiring everyone to have identities on numerous systems.

November 27th, 2006 at 10:57 pm

incircle and interactionchat are good. But what i am asking is something similar to what livejournal has. A Jabber/IRC or some standard based web chat software which can provide integration between web chat IM and Desktop Client IM. So i can put it on web with some standard pre-logged interface and chat with a desktop client like GAIM or trillion.

November 28th, 2006 at 11:19 pm

i think the coolest thing ive seen in chat lately is the off-the-record encryption

December 4th, 2006 at 1:00 pm

Has anyone used the eBuddy Mobile Chat? This is the eBuddy service as you know it (msn, yahoo, aim), on your mobile phone, PDA or Nintendo. Thought this is quite innovative as well. I tried it and in works pretty good!

December 6th, 2006 at 2:40 am

I’ve tried eBuddy mobile on my PDA and it works solid!!!

I don’t see many web messengers in this area unlike eBuddy who does both web and mobile!

December 15th, 2006 at 10:43 pm

A recent service just came out called wengovisio

http://www.wengovisio.com/

It’s supposed to work similarly to the meebo me widget, however, it does AUDIO, and VIDEO.

It’s made by the same people who make the wengophone (open source) a skype competitor.

December 26th, 2006 at 2:47 pm

I checked out the URL given by a dude above.. http://www.matrixconnects.com

I think this is a real real neat idea and is the future of chat really. This is cool indeed

January 14th, 2007 at 6:57 pm

mike: totally agree with you on intelligent bots…but i think perhaps we need to think of interesting, and innovative wats of using nlp…bots are bots but we need to introduce a whole new user interaction around what information extracted from natural langauge is being used for…we certainly thinkg we are on the right track with the moji intelligent messenger…it’s not out yet but for anyone of you interested in stuff like this do visit http://www.morfdynamics.com to get a better idea and feel free to blast away with your comments!!