Chatroulette, the face-to-face random video chat service, is growing slightly less random. The service is adding Localroulette, for location-specific chats, and Channelroulette, for specific topics.
Given the surge of interest in location-based apps, the choice to create a geolocating chat is not surprising. The utility of the themed channels is a bit less easy to grasp once you see what's there.
Instant messaging client Trillian announced on its blog today that an Android version will be available within a couple of weeks.
Trillian dovetails IM from a host of services into one platform, including Facebook Chat, Windows Live, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber/XMPP and MySpaceIM. It will support Android back to version 1.6.
For many years, unified chat clients like Digsby or Adium have provided users with a single app with which to manage several chat protocols at once. Whether your friends are on AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, or Facebook Chat, chances are there's an app that will aggregate your various buddy lists into one tidy window. Skype, however, has remained on its own outside of these clients, but thanks to the forthcoming SkypeKit SDK, the popular voice and video chat app will soon be integrated into other applications.
What's this? The oddball, quirky and occasionally X-rated site that connects random strangers for video chat is a marketer's dream? That doesn't sound right. But that's exactly what Travelocity, the popular travel brand known best for their mascot, the travelling gnome, is saying. In a recent interview with ClickZ, a news and advice site for digital marketers, Travelocity company spokesperson Joel Frey, discussed the Chatroulette marketing campaign and its successes: 350,000 impressions and 400 conversations between potential customers and its "chat specialists." (Yes, Travelocity pays staffers to surf Chatroulette!)
Silentale, the new web service that backs up and archives your contacts and messages from all the communication platforms you use, has now launched into public beta as of this morning. The online application is part universal inbox, part social CRM tool and part contact management solution. But unlike some of its competitors, the best part about Silentale is that it archives your messages - all of your messages, including every single email, Twitter reply or direct message, Facebook message and more and then makes those searchable from one location.
A spin-off of Finnish software development company Nodeta, Flowdock aspires to help developers and others sift out actionable bits of knowledge from ongoing conversations and make them retrievable. Their team messenger services allows separation and tagging of conversational elements.
"In Flowdock, the epiphany comes when you tag a chat message for the first time," Nodeta and Flowdock's CTO Otta Hilska wrote us. "You realize how you just took a piece of conversation and turned it into a nugget of knowledge. Somebody talked about a bug, and you turned it into a bug report. Or pasted a snippet of code, and you categorized and organized it. The real validation for the concept comes when you are looking for some other snippet of code, a link to a partner, an eBook or something else and come to think 'I wonder if it's tagged in Flowdock". Sure enough it will be.'"
Google is touting a new feature for their mobile VoIP application, Google Voice: instant notification of new SMS text messages and voicemails. You may have thought an app meant to replace your phone's functions would already be doing that, but in reality, Google Voice delayed notifications for 15 minutes by default. You could change this to 5 minutes or force a refresh manually, but many don't bother tweaking settings or obsessively refreshing just to see if they have new messages. Now that's no longer necessary - messages are delivered almost immediately.
Did you just get cut off? Is a professional driver behaving badly? Was your car towed? Or better, did you see a cute driver (or a really cool car) in the next lane?
CarPong is a fun an innovative idea that allows users to send messages to other drivers by using their car's license plate number. Like blog commenting for vehicles, this service lets drivers write messages to other drivers, read what others have said about them and search for notes about other drivers. It's an interesting way to make our cars - and the people in them - a lot more connected in real life, and it just might work.
The social media data company Rapleaf has just released the final parts of their 3-part study involving the demographics and online behavior of webmail users. In the first part of the study, gender and age data was examined and revealed some interesting findings...like the fact that Gmail has more female users than male, for example. In the final sections of the study, the company has turned its attention to social networking data to discover more details about webmail users' social media profiles, memberships and network preferences.
Twitter and LinkedIn are announcing a deal tonight that will allow LinkedIn users to publish status updates to their Twitter profiles and pull in some or all Twitter updates to their LinkedIn accounts.
Wait a minute...the two social media companies with some of the most valuable, interesting data on the web made a deal and what do we get? Spammy Twitter streams clouding up our LinkedIn feeds and an occasional uptight Tweet on Twitter that was born inside LinkedIn? We're still waiting for the meaty announcements everyone says are coming someday soon - that Twitter and LinkedIn are open for business.
