Live chat on a blog not really for me, is it for you? |
A little while back there was some activity in the chat scene on blogs, a la 3Bubbles of which I wrote most of this blog entry and then sat on it. Today something called Mobber which can be viewed in an iframe at the bottom of this post shows another side of live chat on a blog.
This type of thing might work for those who have a blog for their business site and want to use it for customer service, but even that has drawbacks. We’ve tried various live chats in the past (liveperson) and they end up being very cost ineffective to operate for small shops like ours.
I don’t have enough time to man yet another IM client (essentially) and comments without records aren’t terribly useful to me, which I agree with Pete Cashmore:
IM conversations generally have a poor signal-to-noise ratio, making it virtually impossible for subsequent readers to find the information they’re looking for. Oh, and don’t get me started on the spam problem.
Now below is the mobber iframe code, doubtful you’ll “see” me much here, but you can try to catch me for a live chat:
Once it rolls off the main page, I’ll try to remember to change the width back to 750 and set the scrolling to no which the width would be problematic with the Hmm three column layout on the home page.
Currently I have about 1% interest in doing this type of thing on any of our blogs, but I’m putting this up for readers as a demo and to see what you think?
Did this post make you go hmm?
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Looks cool to me - even if you’re not around, I can chat with other readers no?
Comment by David — March 23, 2006 @ 11:29 pm PST
Yup, David, that’s the deal. Thanks for stopping by
Comment by TDavid — March 23, 2006 @ 11:47 pm PST
This is cool but it’s an alternative to comments. Personally I love comments because you can go back at any time and see what people said. I assume with this chat thing there isn’t any persistence. Guess sometimes that’s a good thing.
Fuzz
Comment by Fuzz — March 24, 2006 @ 12:15 pm PST
Interesting comment, Fuzz. Thanks. I’m not sure I care for mobber and its ilk as an “alternative to comments” because comments add value to this blog and to the person leaving them (since we don’t use rel=nofollow). The comments in a chat are more like using an IM client to me. That’s not saying having a chatroom or IM connected to a blog is a bad thing, heck, we have an IRC channel for one of our sites (not a blog) but the people who come along after the fact and ask questions that have already been answered in chat won’t benefit from this the same way as those who leave comments like you did.
Comment by TDavid — March 24, 2006 @ 12:31 pm PST
It’s cute, but as you said not very useful. I’ve used IM for customer support before, and you always end up copying and pasting the conversation into an e-mail to save it. Worse, you forget to do that and then log off. Plus, you kinda have to both be there to carry on the conversation, whereas with e-mail you can converse with the other party absent and they can reply whenever. And I agree about persistence and link-love: both good things that chat just doesn’t do.
Comment by Sterling Camden — March 24, 2006 @ 2:10 pm PST
What I liked about it is that I can talk with other people viewing the blog. Comments are cool and important to a blog. This should be an add-on, not an alternative to comments. I like the combination.
Comment by kamal — March 24, 2006 @ 9:47 pm PST
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Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Hmmcast #1: spiders, faces, groups, ++jury_duty, –hearing — March 31, 2006 @ 2:16 pm PST