Slovakian startup Geesee launched its cross site chat service this week and I think it has a lot of potential. It’s an embedded chat service that lets users communicate across any number of web sites in common chat rooms organized by tags. In other words, you can use Geesee to chat about Web 2.0 or any other topic while you are on TechCrunch with people who are on other sites. You can chat in multiple rooms organized by tabs. It’s a potentially powerful connector for thematic conversations all around the web. A Geesee chat box on your site lets your readers chat in real time with visitors to related sites elsewhere. It’s just launched and has it’s kinks, but I really like it. Geesee offers a very different experience from services like Meebo Me and 3Bubbles. In fact, you can’t really even compare them. The eight person company was co-founded by Milan Zigmond and Roman Pohancenik. They say they have raised $50,000 in funding. We profiled Geesee prelaunch in September and I wrote that if the company could pull off what it aims to do, it could change the web chat world. Now that the site has gone live, most everything but scalability looks solid. I’ve embedded a Geesee chat window below this post so we can get some idea of the service’s scalability. (Jump on in, there’s an active conversation going on in the TechCrunch room right after I posted this. To see how you can enter one conversation from multiple sites, try coming in through Marshallk.com Update: The conversation may have devolved as the hour grew later, our apologies if that’s the case when you try it out.) Multiple rooms can be chatted in at once, side by side as tabs inside the interface. Audio notification of new messages in any chat can be turned on or off individually by tab. That’s very important if I’m going to keep using slow Geesee chats while doing something else. Audio notification is a little thing that makes a big impact on usefulness and the ability to turn off audio for individual chats is smart. As you can see from the embedded example below, AdSense at the bottom of the chat window changes every 30 seconds. Geesee says the ads are contextual to the chat room’s tags and the last 4 lines of chat. They are having some problems with the → Read More
Geesee is an early stage startup from Slovakia that will combine topical web chat, tag search and widgets. If you’ve seen MeeboMe, imagine instead a widget that connects a network of web chat rooms organized by tags with access points across many blogs and web pages. Publishers who put a Geesee widget on their page would be facilitating real time communication about the topic of their page with people interested in that topic but who are on other related sites around the web. That’s a big loss of control for a commercial vendor but could be of real benefit for site visitors. We already know that no single page on the internet is the only page on a given topic – why not help us discuss the topic with people who are on other, related pages elsewhere? Geesee is an interesting example of the changing power dynamic online put to the test. If user control over data and communication is one of the next key issues post Clue Train, then there will likely be many more applications like this that do things like tie different web pages together in interesting ways. Geesee gets its name from the acronym for Global Chat. It should launch near the end of this year, but you can get on the list for beta accounts now. Here’s how it will be used: If I’m reading a blog about caring for German Shepherds or selecting a school for a child or deciding whether to buy Sea Monkeys from the back of a comic book – that blog could have a Geesee widget installed that would let me do a number of things. I could use it to chat with other people visiting the same site and the same time, I could use it to chat with people on other sites in rooms that have been tagged with the same terms as mine or I can search by tag and chat with people in any other room via any other participating page. Users can participate in multiple tabbed chat rooms at once and no registration is required for use so chats can be anonymous. Private channels will also be available. Search results will display room names, tags, descriptions and the number of people chatting in each room. The feature set will develop over time of course, but plans exist to create simple plug ins for the major → Read More
