Companies like Google and Twitter have taught us that a simplistic front-end and limited features can effectively have much more appeal to users than overly complex services, as long as they fill a need and work as advertised. TinyChat falls under the category of really simple applications that might just be what people are looking for, although I think this one ist just a thad too Spartan.
TinyChat lets you create a basic web-based chat room with just one click of the button, by generating a unique URL that you can share with whoever you choose to invite to the virtual hang-out. Share the link and users will be redirected to a simple chat room interface that lets them input messages and change their usernames (and that’s really all it does). There’s also a way to embed a badge on other sites and forums to spread the link to the chatroom, showing the number of active users. Once you close the screen, the data is gone, so don’t use it to discuss anything worth remembering even if it lets you save the chat log.
Here’s an example chat room where all the cool kids are hanging out right now.
Update: seems a bit buggy, getting MySQL errors at regular intervals and the screen seems to freeze constantly too.
The instant chat rooms are starting to become pretty popular on micro-sharing service Twitter, which is kind of strange if you consider that many people look at Twitter as one gigantic chat room to begin with. Could be the fact that the app annoyingly posts tweets to your stream to get more people to join.
The service was created by Daniel Blake, who seems to have a knack for these types of micro-applications judging by his Crunchbase profile. He’s also the guy behind TinyPaste, which we reviewed here earlier, and ControlC (previous coverage).
It’s really neat,
I’ll definitely use it for quick chats with clients’ tech teams, rather than give out my personal MSN.
Yea?
I went to both links and they appear to be having a problem with their database.
Main site showed a MySQL dump and the example chat asked me for nickname and then I get an error page.
Maybe not so ready for techcrunch exposure…lol
I want a chatroom where i can set the username of any end user – which meebo offers only to “partners”. Tweaking by room creator wont make complex for end users, it is only end users who demand simplicity.
There is video review on TinyChat here: http://www.tweetube.com/tC
http://www.chatzy.com has been doing this for ages, and without the Twitter spam.
It’s a great addon for Twitter and also for use with people you don’t want to give out IM address’ to as Tim said. I’ll be using this a lot I think! Great stuff.
heyy wats up
it’s nice
I want to talk with a person who can speak English you can use http://www.tinychat/today Iam a chinese
very neat, simple and elegant
although I am not what their business model is!
i am sure it will be very useful for startup companies to quickly chat..
and are these guys planning on enabling video and voice chat as well?? that wud be super cool..
hello. I want talk with you http://www.tinychat/today
I hope they get integrated with meebo, so the tinychat window can be opened within the meebo interface. otherwise we have the same problem of proliferating chat clients/pages.
cool, easy and simple
hahaha the twiter is taking advantage now
I just tried one of his previous sites: ControlC. It seems to be abandon-ware. Not boosting the confidence for this new service.
ControlC is being rewritten with more awesome. It’ll be back.
Thanks a million for mentioning about TinyChat. I have tested it on Opera, Firefox and Internet Explorer and it worked with all of them. However, I am from Bangladesh and my internet speed is very slow. So, I experienced that after posting a message, I had to wait a few seconds for seeing it on the chat window.
I like the way you can just jump into any chat room you like by changing the url. Lots of fun
Privacy anyone ??
This isn’t Spartan. This is SPARTAAA!!!!
The example chat room says:
An error occurred while attempting to connect to the server
The Error returned was:
Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock’ (11)
They need to figure out some kinks still.
got this error too
i’ve written a post about them on my blog too! http://tr.im/gk8j
First, I love TechCrunch, so this is not bashing.
What is the innovation here? What is the needlemover? As mentioned above, there seems to be similar ideas out there already. This one is simple, buggy and late. Its a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist (who *cares* if people have your IM name)?
TC, I love you guys because you are my filter for what matters. I can’t say that this one does.
Why the coverage?
Just like ppl say before. The chat has frequent error messages. Somebody has gotta fix those things before getting on techcrunch. They really blow a great opportunity for promotion.
Anyway, I’ll be watching were tinchat is going, might be quite useful actually!
Great little chat room app. I am going to try and enable it on my site – possibly a simple addition for tech support??? – http://www.designedbyeh.com
How is this supposed to be different from other sites? Just because the interface is nice and easy, I don’t think so.
This would be worth something had it been launched 10 years ago. Not now dude.
anyonee wanna chat
How do I invite people into the chat room? Am I only able to invite people to join if I sign in via Twitter?
Share the TinyChat URL (http://www.tinychat.com/xxxxx), its the title of the chat window or you can get from Options.
-BJ
Nice
could use some work
distractions:
meta data, too diff to read the inputs, unnecessary
Fix: larger nicknames, loss meta data
side rail, not interested in following someone who can ping out
fix: follow expectation – topic oriented not user – the inherent brevity of a tiny chat warrants this
fix: support the novelty of igniting a chat, define on what premise
fix: use side rail to list recent hot topics
Committment: none
fix: encourage users to retain a nickname
fix: loose user info in rail
fix: list most pop topics
fix: when joining, prompt with “are you nickname, 20 peeps asked for you when you last left” (if there are cookies to recall ip address)
fix: give users comet quality ( you’ll have to pay me to outline this in your product )
thanks fo rthe new idea
cute, but not quite there
Lots of glitches with Tinychat… Not ready for TC!
Not your best work, Robin.
We are still debating about a wet “kiss” and a cream pie. No worries, we’ll let you know.
PS: kind of a strange surprise. One of the speakers has offered to match the “prize” -which is now €700!!
This is beutiful. I love the design, harr harr
Amazing just needs options for customization.
Great post! I was just wondering, with Tinychat asking for our twitter username and password then posting an update to our twitter, do they store any of that information? I’ve never quite understood how auto-tweets work.
Simple, and do its work. Nice.
At StanzIQ, we created Speeqe as an Open Source Project which lets folks instantly spawn chat rooms for free. http://www.speeqe.com .
It is cool, we use it internally, and other folks are running their own Speeqe servers as well as using our hosted version, but we felt that pursuing real time search and personalized news feeds was a much better path to apply the funds from our Series A to than going down the path of building a better Meebo.
Definitely useful site .
Great for quick conference chats.
But I think meebo can add this feature to their poll of products and tinychat will have a much harder life.
I like it. Simple is good. I am using it to chat with my Krumlr users and get some feedback.
Looks a lot like Chatterous, http://chatterous.com.
Also, check out http://webchattr.com/ (which has been live, doing the same thing for well over a year). As a bonus, WebChattr is highly optimized for viewing on iphones.
… and it’s architected to even work well over slow and/or flaky connections you might experience over EDGE and 3G
Hell yes. webchattr really is a fantastic chat application. It never goes down. Handles tremendous loads – and has a few pretty hilarious smileys.
I’d recommend webchattr.com over all this other crap anyday.
I use cwidget.de a lot. You just pull the “start chat button” into your bookmark bar and can start chatting on the website you’re currently on (with everyone who does the same thing). Super cool.
It would be great if they added the ability to “pop-out” the chat box from the browser. That way, we could use it at work, like the GMail Chat feature.
The intelligence services are going to have a field day with this app. Just imagine you are the bad guys and you want to link up with other bad guys. No fuss No Muss Just Boom!
Hi there
I havent seen this chat before, but there are plenty of chat plugins now that are excellent, and far better looking than this one, if you have a look on widgetbox you will find lots of stuff to use on there.
Just my tip for finding good chat stuff !
Woc
hey
hi nathin
hi im shatora
nathin how old are you
im 20
I’ve created a PHP script that you can run on your own servers to implement your own tinychat.
It’s Chat Software Script. Hope you like it.
awesome.
I like this idea, but it wont work for me to talk to my office mates. THey have it blocked on the computers at work. We have been using batch chat program that I found.
I also have a “work in progress” webchat ( locuspokus.com ) equivalent to tinyChat. It’s based on a .net kernel over mono which can handle up to 15Kusers / server.
Yes, the old tinychat v1 was a breeze. Light and easy, it was reliable, worked well.
The new tinychat kicks you out, freezes, is unclear, and puts cookies on your computer. It is no longer “tiny” and the added features keep it from being functional.