Sunday, December 04, 2005

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.

6 comments:

  1. Hey!

    What was this written in? Are you going to release the code? That way people can run their own servers and not burden your net connection?

    Also, have you considered allowing users to be in multiple chats at the same time by parsing the input? That way if you're in #drivel and #spam you can /msg #spam or /msg #drivel and get where you want to go?

    ReplyDelete
  2. (a) written in java
    (b) yes, after i get the code into a state that i'm comfortable releasing it in. right now the core bits are still too unstable for releasing. writing this has been a learning excercise, and i don't feel like subjecting well meaning bot writers to my learning pains. i do plan to release the code though
    (c) you can be in multiple chats by just talking to multiple chat bots. there are 11 partychat sn's. if you honestly have more than 11 chats you want to be a part of, then you're definitely in a use-case that I never dreamed of. having to specify the chat you wanted to send the message through seemed like a very bad user experience, so I purposely avoided it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Awesome stuff akshay!

    ReplyDelete
  4. This is a great project! Glad to see its still under development. Listen to Khum.com on the live stream if you want sometime.

    We set up a room at partychat at "khum" since so many listeners use Gtalk to chat with the morning dj. It will be cool to talk with each other for the first time tomorrow. We are West Coast. You should join sometime since you created this. If I was a programmer I would be all over this.

    Thank you for your work!

    ReplyDelete
  5. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  6. nice informative post.partychat is very secured.thanks for sharing such a great post.I would like to say Teens are mostly attracted by the entertainments. They always wish to have a chatwith their friends. Most of the news that teens share would be related to entertainment.once again thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete