Companies like Google and Twitter have taught us that a simplistic front-end and limited features can effectively have much more appeal to users than overly complex services, as long as they fill a need and work as advertised. TinyChat falls under the category of really simple applications that might just be what people are looking for, although I think this one ist just a thad too Spartan.
TinyChat lets you create a basic web-based chat room with just one click of the button, by generating a unique URL that you can share with whoever you choose to invite to the virtual hang-out. Share the link and users will be redirected to a simple chat room interface that lets them input messages and change their usernames (and that’s really all it does). There’s also a way to embed a badge on other sites and forums to spread the link to the chatroom, showing the number of active users. Once you close the screen, the data is gone, so don’t use it to discuss anything worth remembering even if it lets you save the chat log.
Here’s an example chat room where all the cool kids are hanging out right now.
Update: seems a bit buggy, getting MySQL errors at regular intervals and the screen seems to freeze constantly too.
The instant chat rooms are starting to become pretty popular on micro-sharing service Twitter, which is kind of strange if you consider that many people look at Twitter as one gigantic chat room to begin with. Could be the fact that the app annoyingly posts tweets to your stream to get more people to join.
The service was created by Daniel Blake, who seems to have a knack for these types of micro-applications judging by his Crunchbase profile. He’s also the guy behind TinyPaste, which we reviewed here earlier, and ControlC (previous coverage).
