Not so tiny after all: Tinychat, a simple text, video and audio communication platform, is growing by leaps and bounds.
First launched in February 2009 as a simple way to create Web-based chat rooms, Tinychat today is a full-blown chat system with lots of bells and whistles.
And the service is gaining traction, fast.
Founder Dan Blake tells me they’ve reached a point where they’re gaining 10,000 new users on a daily basis (or roughly 300k per month), which is a lot considering registration isn’t even required to use Tinychat, and that they’re seeing 500 million minutes of usage per month.
Blake adds that Tinychat, which won the award for best bootstrapped startup at our most recent Crunchies show, has over 50 servers in production to keep the service up and running 24/7, and that they’re seeing 11% week over week growth in page views these days.
He also stresses that, unlike sites like Chatroulette, there’s a moderation team working around the clock to make sure no nudity, other offensive and illegal content shows up.
To make the service more appealing for users around the world, Tinychat is today introducing a new feature: real-time chat translation. Basically, users can now select in which language they want to read messages, regardless the native tongue of their conversation partner(s). The feature was built using Google’s Translate API, which means dozens of languages are supported and sometimes comprehensible translations are even served up.
In all seriousness, the translations are actually pretty decent, and I think it’s a really cool feature. It reminds me a lot of XIHA Life, a social network that is also banking on real-time chat translations to position itself in a unique way.
Check it out and let us know what you think.
Tinychat is a dead simple, free to use video/audio/desktop chat system. It is entirely web based, requires no downloads or plugins (aside from Flash) and works on all browsers and operating systems.
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