It’s been awhile since we last posted to the blog – we’ve been extremely busy 🙂
Widgets with im/email/sms
One of our most requested features was the ability to embed a chatterous group into a website or blog. This is now live for all public groups.
The ability to hook up im/email/sms adds an interesting twist to widgets, since people can add their contacts right from a widget page. Traditionally, people were only active on a chat widget while they were visiting your blog or website. Once they navigated to another page they couldn’t send/receive messages for the chat room. Now people can remain in touch via mainstream communication channels even when they’re not viewing your site through a browser window.
If you’d like to see the widget in action, you can check out the embed preview page for the Hacker News Chatterous group here.
Interesting uses of Chatterous groups and new API
We are constantly surprised at how people end up using Chatterous groups. Since each group gets its own email, IM and phone contacts, messaging a group in an automated fashion is fairly straightforward. A few companies are using Chatterous as a service monitoring system, sending out email, IM or text message alerts when something went wrong.
Another interesting case is broadcast groups, where a few people can broadcast to many subscribers. One specific example is the Amazon Deals group, where people sign up to receive instant deal notifications by IM, Email or sms.
However, there were a few cases where it was not convenient to automatically send an email, IM or text message to a group. In the interest of making communication with Chatterous groups as easy as possible we’ve released an early version of our API for public use. You can request an API key here.
You can check out our API documentation here.
Sharing is caring
We’ve added share icons to the bottom right of a group window to make sharing easier for people. It’s now a one-click action to post your group to Facebook and Twitter!
Misc. stuff
We’ve put up a new homepage and have switched our javascript/web clients from polling to comet long-polling 😎