Text chat choices

revised and expanded 7/28/2001

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Instant messaging programs, like AOL Messenger, ICQ, and Yahoo Messenger are primarily used for one-to-one communication. You build a buddy list of other members, you get an alert signal to let you know when your buddies come online, and you can quickly connect with one another and talk or type away. With AOL Messenger, you can also create such a multi-person chat room. To do so, you need to invite people by name, and all the participants need to have the software installed on their systems, and need to be registered AOL Messenger members. In other words, this platform is not designed for holding open public chat sessions. It is, however, well-suited for meetings among people who already know one another. It is very easy to save the transcript, using a command in the application. And if you have a microphone, you can also initiate private one-on-one voice conversations with other participants in such a room.
The capabilities of the other major instant messaging platforms seem to be very similar.

Customer-service oriented programs, like HumanClick, make it easy for a visitor to a particular Web page to initiate a live discussion with a representative of the Web site. In some cases, you have a choice of using text or voice to communicate.

"Chat" as we usually use the term refers to a room-style environment where many people can gather as a group and talk to one another. Today it comes in two flavors -- voice and text. The look and feel can be very like an instant messenger application -- typing and or talking.

While voice is compelling when everyone who needs to connect is properly equipped, text remains the lowest common denominator, reaching a much larger audience. Also, text is relatively easy to save as an archive and to search through.

When shopping for a text-chat platform, most people would agree that the top two goals are:

1) simple to understand/easy to use (that includes no firewall problems, and no need to download software/plugins)
2) cross-platform and cross-browser (works well with Macs as well as PC, and with Netscape as well as IE, and in all likely combinations thereof)

And if at all possible, you'd want a platform that is free, meaning that there's no need to beg/haggle/negotiate to get free access.

Depending on the anticipated size of your audience you might also need to be able to easily set up multiple chat rooms and handle many visitors in a single room.

Two additional characteristics are also important to me, but are often overlooked:

-- It should be easy to save complete transcripts, so people who weren't able to attend live can catch up on what transpired and also as interesting content that can draw traffic to a Web site by way of search engines. And

-- Visitors should see all the text, not just what was posted after they joined. Not every one will appear on the dot of the hour, and those who show up late should be able to read back and sort out the context, without you having to explain the same points and answer the same questions over and over again.

There are three main styles of text chat today:
1) IRC-based
2) Java-based
3) HTML

IRC or Internet Relay Chat was around long before there was a Web and continues to thrive. Software of this type typically runs into firewall problems. The folks in charge of a corporate firewall have to open up a channel to allow the traffic through. Even when those folks are willing to make the change, that is a hassle.

In addition, IRC chat typically presents problems in saving a complete transcript and only shows you what has happened since you joined.

Java-based chat also typically presents problems in saving a complete transcript and only shows what has happened since you joined.

HTML chat shows you all the text and makes it easy to save it all (just using the Save As function in your browser). That's my favorite type.

On July 19, we tested two text chat services: parachat and volcano (in the implementation at the Online Training Institute www.oltraining.com). Both are java-based, and hence both only show what has been entered since you joined and both make saving transcripts difficult.

With parachat, while it is possible to save what you can highlight with your browser, after you have seen a couple of screens full of text the
application resets -- erasing the old text and starting fresh, which means it's virtually impossible to save a complete transcript.

On July 26, we tested Bravenet, which offers far more capability than parachat and also is free. The chat window is very large, and you can easily adjust the type size and font to your taste. When entering, you can provide a "profile" of yourself (the best kind of profile appears to be your email address and URL) in addition to your name. Then anyone clicking on your name in the list of participants sees that profile information. Bravenet also make it very easy for any participant to "push" Web pages to everyone else. To receive such pages, a participant needs to have clicked on "Webtouring" to activate that feature. All it takes to push a page is entering a complete URL (beginning with http://) in the chat window. A new window opens up showing that page.

Thanks to the page pushing, you could use Bravenet to deliver a prepared presentation -- with Web pages that explain your main points and that have links to take your audience to other pages. In fact, you could, for free, conduct a very sophisticated meeting -- combining the text chat and page pushing of Bravenet and the voice capabilites of PalTalk (see www.samizdat.com/paltalk) by simply running both applications at the same time.

Limitations: While page pushing could be very valuable if properly used, it is subject to abuse, because any participant can push any page at any time.  In many cases, simply setting a clear and understandable set of rules (e.g., the host needs to give permission before anyone else can push pages) could work fine. (FYI -- when you push a page, other people see it immediately, but the person doing the pushing does not. The "pusher" needs to open that page manually in a separate browser window.) But you need to balance the benefits of this capability with the risk that a prankster use it to make a mockery of your session. And even if the pushed pages are all relevant to the discussion, each pushed page opens a new browser window, which can quickly tax the capabilities of older PCs; so even well-intentioned participants could wreak havoc through over-enthusiatic pushing.

In addition, you can't paste text into the Bravenet chat form. Hence you have previously prepared text, you should put that text on a Web page and push the audience to that page. Also, there is no simple way to capture a complete transcript with Bravenet. The best I could do was to periodically highlight text in the chat window, do CONTROL C to copy it, then open a Word document and paste the text there with CONTROL V. The buffer on my PC held all the text up to about the 3/4 point of this discussion so I could see it all by scrolling up through the chat window. Then the system refreshed, erasing all the previous dialogue. Fortunately, I had just saved before the text was erased. (You can see the resulting transcript at www.samizdat.com/chat200.html) This is a common drawback with Java-based chat platforms. In addition, with this application (and other Java-based chat), you do not see any dialogue that took place before you joined.

Earlier, we had checked Multicity, which also is java-based. On the plus side, they offer free automatic translation that is amazingly fast and effective. On the negative side, we had several instances where people trying to go to the same chat room with the same URL ended up in different chat rooms, with no way to talk to one another and no way to know that they were all online at the same time. That's a serious glitch.

The chat at web-net.org, that I used to use for my weekly sessions was quite good. It was HTML-based, simple, and free. Unfortunately, web-net went out of business a couple months ago.

SiteScape too is HTML-based. It automatically saves transcripts, and includes threading; and the chat transcript can be part of an overall forum
environment, allowing participants and those who weren't able to show up live to continue the discussion asynchronously. I'm prejudiced in its favor,
from having known the developers for 5+ years. It isn't free. It comes as part of their Forum product, for asynchronous web-board style discussion, but it is probably the best text chat around. (Check my "Web business bootcamp" discussion area at SiteScape).

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