Over the last six months Google has been ramping up Friend Connect, its social online identity platform that’s a direct rival of Facebook Connect (both products opened up to the public last December). Since then Google and third party developers have released a slew of gadgets and features, including the Social Bar, Recommendations, and Comment Translation. One of the latest to join the fray is ClackPoint, a powerful new gadget that integrates realtime text chat, voice conferencing and basic document sharing with Friend Connect.
The gadget works as you’d expect. Clicking on the ‘Call’ button will activate your microphone, and your voice can then be heard by anyone else in your chat room. Alternatively, you can dial in from a phone to one of the site’s dedicated lines (hit the button in the upper right hand corner for a list of numbers). There’s also a standard text-based group chat.
As far as sharing goes, you can participate in a group-edited notepad, import PDF slides that can be viewed by other chat members, and quickly send out a poll to everyone else in the chat room. You can try out the gadget for yourself here.
While the gadget could probably be used in a business setting, I suspect most businesses will stick with products like WebEx for their serious calls. That said, this would be perfect for more casual group meetings where real identities are still important (for example, a meeting discussing plans for your childs’ soccer team). For more, check out the Google blog post introducing the gadget. You can also find a full directory of gadgets available here.
I have to try it now
looks cooollllllll
I have signed up and joined the site. The idea is really good I hope it catches on. I had a look at their blog and their last post was over six months ago??? Which makes me think are these guys working on their stuff??
Cool app. Definitely worth trying.
Great applications but I am a little ticked off because most of the beta apps google put out there cannot scale, so there is no way I will expose my users to these innovations because it wont be long befor I get a round of complaints because they have reached reached my quota.
What happened to the cloud offering I was all ready to invest in some work into coding a neat app for that but again no scale, after a while these apps just become a noise until someone does something similar and then they Have my full attention.
Google you need to start making traction on these things, maybe I am being a bit rude but you snooze you loose., .
Google’s taking their pretty time, but they’re taking all the right steps. Being google, they’re allowed to move at about the quarter of the pace everyone else has to move at.
So this doesn’t show up chat in real time –like in letter by letter– so I’m not interested for now. I’ll wait for Google Wave
Letter by letter? I cannot think of any scenarios where you would want that – particularly when you have the ‘party typing’ activity status. Sending each charater typed as a seperate packet would be very wasteful on bandwidth!
Interesting. I’ve implemented it into one of my websites. The nice thing is that you can embed the same widget into several pages on the site and it aggregates the users on all those pages. Check it out if you wish http://masterru...penpal.php#chat
follow us on twitter for updates @clack_point
Thanks for the great article (and the comments so far)!
We’ve now set up an official twitter account at @clackpoint and would welcome any feedback.
Richard Mortier
Founder, ClackPoint
cool
Interesting. I’ve implemented it into one of my websites.