PartyChat Tip #1

If you're in a party chat that you don't plan to leave, alias the party chat name in your
buddy list. This way you don't need to remember that "partychat#@gmail.com" is where you're in party chat "drivel" -- you can see and receive messages from "drivel" itself.

double the excitement

I've managed to corral my friend Rohit in to help me develop PartyChat, so hopefully stability / feature set should improve more rapidly in days to come. Also, a lot of the features he wants to add are best accomplished through rewriting most of the current code (making it better) which bodes well for (a) me doing documentation and (b) the code being eventually released.

server update

I was originally running PartyChat on my desktop with a wireless connection; sadly the wireless connection in my apt is incredibly flakey so the server would get disconnected every few hours. I've now moved PartyChat to a dedicated machine physically connected to our internet router, so it should be much more stable now. Enjoy!

PartyChat launched!

Techwalla is pleased to announce the launch of PartyChat for Google Talk. PartyChat is like a group chat, except that it's less obtrusive and persistent across different login sessions.

For example, say your friends are in a party chat named "drivel". To enter the chat, IM partychat@gmail.com with the line "/enter drivel." After that, you'll receive messages sent in "drivel" from partychat@gmail.com and all messages you send to partychat@gmail.com will be broadcasted to your friends in "drivel."

If you log out of Google Talk and then log back in, you're still in the party chats you were in prior to logging out. To leave a party chat, IM "/leave" or "/exit" to the address you were chatting with (e.g. partychat@gmail.com).

But maybe you want to be in multiple partychats? Instead of partychat@gmail.com, you can also connect using partychat0@gmail.com, partychat1@gmail.com, partychat2@gmail.com, and so on, up to partychat9@gmail.com.

It doesn't matter which PartyChat address your friends are connected to. If your friend Jimmy creates a party chat named jimmy-drivel while talking to partychat2@gmail.com, you can join by IM'ing "/enter jimmy-drivel" to your own favorite address (like, maybe partychat4@gmail.com).

So send an im to partychat@gmail.com (or partychat0@gmail.com, partychat1@gmail.com, etc.), make a chat, join a chat, and have fun!

(Big thanks to Michael Bolin for all his continued help with developing/deploying PartyChat)


Disclaimer: I happen to work for Google. PartyChat was produced without any internal knowledge of Google Talk and is not endorsed by Google in any way. If you have any problems with it, please contact only me.