Google Lets You “Chatback” With Your Visitors
As many of you may know I love Google Talk. I love it because of its light foot print both on my hard drive and when running in memory. I love the integration with all my Google services. And I love the flexibility that it provides. If you would like a copy of it, you can download it as part of the Google Pack. Or by it self from http://www.google.com/talk.
However the Google Talk team just gave me another reason to love Google Talk. It now allows me to have direct conversations with my visitors with a simple click of the mouse on the chat bubble you see to your left.
This new feature is called chatback and allows you to integrate Google Talk in to any website you have access to add HTML. Chatback uses the web-based Google Talk Gadget so your visitors don’t need to download anything. It opens in a new window so they can keep chatting with you even if they browse to other pages.
Of course, chatback isn’t just for blogs. You can use it on any web page that you can add HTML content to. To get started, visit the chatback start page. (This is also linked from the Google Talk homepage.) Then just copy the provided HTML snippet to your web site. Visitors will then see a badge on your site indicating your availability, and can click to start a chat with you. If there’s a time when you don’t want to be distracted, just set your online status to “busy” and visitors won’t be able to chat with you until you change your status back to “available.”
So now if you want to chat with me about anything and you see a Green dot. You have the go ahead to say hi or ask me any question you want. I may not always respond, because I sometimes forget to turn of GTalk when I am in a meeting or giving a presentation.
Tags: Blog, chatback, Google, GTalk, Instant Message, News
Social:
February 28th, 2008 at 7:52 am
Have you gotten any spam or abuse over GTalk yet?
February 28th, 2008 at 7:58 am
No it has been very reliable for me.
February 29th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Its a great idea but it needs some work. I know this is something new so hopefully they will improve the chatback function and Google Talk.
When somebody clicks the button it should popup in the regular Google Talk window instead of having to open up 3 additional windows. Also right now if you have 1 user click your button then you close that session/windows the next time your button is clicked you will not be notified unless you close Talk completely and restart it.
March 1st, 2008 at 11:11 am
[...] Google Lets You “Chatback” with Your Visitors (Nick Berardi) [...]
March 5th, 2008 at 2:53 am
Nice in theory but needs a bit more work to be really useful.