myWebChat: IM with your site’s visitors

I once saw a comment on AlphaInventions saying that the user would find it very nice if they could know who was visiting their blog and could talk to them in real time.

That, along with the ChatterBox in Perlmonk's website gave me the idea: why not build a ChatterBox-like application that bloggers could use as a widget and regular sites could have as a pop-up or as  an embedded frame/div?

I did some digging and all I could find were apps that needed installation or were built in heavy Java. So I started out on my own project, which I called myWebChat (because it was my Web Chat application, of course ).

Well, several weeks later (perhaps a few months with all the stuff I have going on), I am proud to announce myWebChat version 0.2 and the hot-site.

The funcionality is still pretty basic, but will allow you to talk to anyone who enters the chat with their username (no password required yet). It's like having an open chat room in your own website.

What it is:

• It's a chat application that stays hosted on our servers, but shows on your website - you just need to add a snippet of code to your page.
• It's free: as in beer - you don't pay anything to use it on one domain. However, since I also need to pay my bills, I accept donations for the free version, which can also work as payment for the premium version. The main difference between the free and premium versions is a Google Ad on the Gui.
• It's light: built using Ajax, having MySQL and PHP on the server side, it's as light and fast as it gets...
• It's throughput friendly: in order to get the closest to real-time chatting possible without sending hundreds of requests per minute, it optimizes each call to the server by sleeping on the server side in case it doesn't find any new messages. The end result is less connection initiations, which means less throughput, which means that your hosting company won't get rich on your expense.
• It's safe: all my coding was done having safety in mind. If you find a bug, please do feel free to send me an email or add it to the Wish List page on the hot-site.
• It's cross-browser friendly: tested on Mozilla Firefox and MS IE. Seriously, why doesn't MS follow the standards?! Web developers should stop hacking their code to get it to work with IE's non-complience. But that's subject for another topic... this is not the place to rant.
• It's easy to install: follow the steps on the Install page to get your ChatMasterId and post the <IFRAME> code on the page you want it to show. That's it.
• It's multi-lingual: So far the site and the app come in 2 languages: English and Brazilian Portuguese. French is in the making and should be available in the next couple of weeks. If you'd like to see it in another language and would like to help out, get in touch.

What it's NOT:

• It's NOT something that needs to be downloaded and installed in each client machine.
• It's NOT something that you as a webmaster will have to download into your site's filesystem. All it takes is a snippet of code that you get from our hot-site.
• It's NOT an application that talks to existing IM software such as MSN, Yahoo!, Skype... but who knows, given enough incentive, it might one day become it.

Pre-requisites:

• A modern web browser;
• Javascript enabled;
• Cookies enabled;

Please let me know what you think of this app either here or preferably at the Wish List page, or send me a message through the contact form. Your opinion is important!

Note: I'm having some issues with emails on the server I hosted the app in, and will be changing hosts pretty soon. Please be patient if it takes me a while to reply to any emails sent from the contact form, and ping me here if I don't reply at all - since it probably means I didn't get your email.