Chatroulette has recently been stepping things up in order to secure their spot in the ranks of popular social websites, adding new features and giving the site a facelift. But is the next step in the revamping of Chatroulette doing away with the chat? Chatroulette’s founder, Andrey Ternowsky, told NewTeeVee that the future of the site might focus entirely on telepresence and do away with text chat completely.
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User-generated social game and chat platform provider Worlize has launched the beta version of its software on major social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and OpenSocial. In a nutshell, the platform allows users to interact with each other in fun, 2D environments as well as play user-created games with each other. The Los Angeles based company also announced securing $150,000 in angel funding that it will use to continue building out the product and hire talent. Public launch of the platform is not due out until fall but players can still sign up to try out the public beta release.
Do you remember ICQ (“I Seek You”)? It was one of the first desktop download chat applications and was sold to AOL for $400 million in 1998. Strangely, it fell off the map after the acquisition, but has since resurfaced as a type of community-based social network that leverages Facebook and Twitter. We take a look below.
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In a first for the social gaming scene, BigPoint is announcing that they will be partnering with Vivox to release Voice Chat over their suite of social games at bigpoint.com. This comes only a week after Vivox raised $7 million from IDG Ventures, and their statement that “Voice is an essential part of the explosive growth of the social web.” BigPoint games is a massive gaming community, boasting over 100,000,000 registered users and a wide variety of games across many genres.
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Facebook with more than 400 million users is largest social network out there and with Facebook Chat, also one of the main players in IM market. Many people don’s see a reason why use other instant messengers while all their friends and colleagues are over at Facebook.
Although Facebook Chat is very popular, web interface lacks many features you would like to see on your IM client, that’s why we provide you with best and full function Facebook Chat desktop clients for Windows and Mac platforms.
Digsby is very powerful client that knows the “language” of many popular social networks and email services. I will name just largest platforms: Facebook Chat, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Talk, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo, Gmail, Yahoo mail, AOL/AIM Mail and others. It can really become your only software to update all your networks, check email and chat with buddies. Digsby is available for Windows – Mac and Linux versions coming soon (Thanks Mihnea!).
Check out this video to see main features and how it all works:
Meebo, the online chat service that lets you log into all your instant messenger clients from a central location, has announced its agreement with Universal Music Group as its latest partner. This deal signifies a branding opportunity for both Meebo and UMG, as the music company will be able to distribute premium content through Meebo’s various services and enable users to share it with their friends from there.
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Last night Meebo announced that it rolled out the first live version of its Community IM service on Flixster, the movie social network. Back in July I wrote about Meebo’s new service and called it a “Userplane-like platform”. Ultimately it is very similar in that both Userplane and Meebo have ultimately launched a Facebook-like chat platform available for third-party sites. This one looks pretty cool as displayed in the video below.
When it comes to the social web, it’s pretty clear that Facebook has been leading the pack for the past year and a half. Even Yahoo! duplicated many of the features provided by the Facebook platform and Facebook Connect in their new services announced last night. This new chat platform also includes updates and notifications.
One of the cool features of this new service is that if you want to continue a conversation but don’t want to stay on the site you are at you can pop-out the conversation to another window on Meebo.com. I’m not quite sure how valuable this component actually is to be honest since you are still going to need at least one browser window open.
Either way, the trend toward new types of internal community chat platforms is an interesting one and over the past 6 to 12 months there have been some significant releases by the largest players. We will continue to follow the chat space as it evolves over the coming months.
Last night Meebo announced a slew of new partners for its white-label instant messaging service. The announcement also included statements that the company now has almost 73 million monthly users which is most definitely a bold statement. I took the opportunity to speak with Seth Sternberg, CEO of Meebo, about what these announcements mean for his company and what the future holds.
We discussed Meebo and potential integration with mobile platforms as well as how his product fits on the social web. Meebo offers a product which is nearly identical to Userplane and heavily resembles Facebook’s new chat client. I spoke with Seth about these similarities and what all of the recent chat services means for the future of chat on the web.
Check out our interview below to learn more about the future of Meebo and chat on the web!
When Bebo launched their IM service one month ago, we were there to break the news. Unfortunately not many other people found that news to be very interesting. Within a month the service was apparently shut down. Over the weekend Mashable was the first to notice that the service had disappeared. I was going to write an article as it happened but I forgot.
Why did I forget? I forgot because I don’t use Bebo IM! Facebook chat has proven to become a central IM service. Within months, it has become one of the primary chat platforms for me (then again I write about Facebook everyday). There is no word as to why Bebo decided to shut down the chat application but our guess is that not enough people were using the service.
There could have also been an issue with abuse. Bebo was recently acquired by AOL who has been trying to cobble together their diverse social products. Unlike Facebook and MySpace, the majority of Bebo traffic comes from abroad. Have you used the Bebo chat service? Are you concerned about it disappearing?
This weekend Bebo has released a chat feature for their site. The new feature resembles Facebook’s chat in that there is a chat display at the bottom of every page on the site. You can view a list which displays current friends that are online and then there is also separate windows for each instant message. The more messages you open, the more prompts that show up (as displayed in the image below).
Chat is rapidly becoming a standard feature across social platforms. I’ve been discussing chat an increasing amount as Meebo and Userplane continue to expand their offerings and social platforms continue to roll out new chat features. It’s great to see Bebo releasing their own version of chat as well. Chat naturally integrates into social networks so it’s not surprising to see Bebo release this.
I would guess that we’ll see other social networks currently without chat features begin to roll out a service over the coming months. Most social networks appear to be following Facebook’s lead when it comes to rolling out new features as they are now the largest social network worldwide. It will be interesting to see what creative twists we see on newly released chat platforms.
Thanks to Harel Shattenstein for the heads up!
