So when I opened Yobongo on Friday, my first thought was, There must be a Web app in here somewhere. My second thought was, Oh, wow! Global Yobongo chat and private rooms are open to everyone! So that's the news. You can now use Yobongo no matter where you are, although the location-specific rooms are still only in select cities. But there's more. As Caleb told me coyly, "iPhone is just the start" for Yobongo. "We want to help people communicate more efficiently," Elston says, and that means everybody.

The Transition From Texting

I'm home in Atlanta for the holidays, and, fortunately, so are tons of my friends. Now that I finally could, I decided to beta test Yobongo with them. When Elston contacted me, I was on my way to see those friends at the time, and a great many of them have iPhones. So I created a private chat room for us, invited them all via a Web link in an SMS message, and told them what Yobongo does.

"It's a live, persistent chat room," I told them. "There are public rooms and private rooms." I was improvising based on the new version. "There's a global room now, and soon, there will be local, neighborhood-based rooms, so you can meet people around you. We can use this private room I made, and it also has direct messages." They got the idea.

We already used Apple's native iMessage for this, but group texting is annoying. It's hard to tell who sent the message, some people don't have group messaging turned on, et cetera. The new Yobongo features made the transition easy. It just used the contacts on my phone. I could send them invitations via SMS or email, and when they clicked on the link and downloaded the free app, they were in.

A Sense of Place

My friends are geeks in that they are the kind of people who have smartphones. But they aren't geek geeks. They consider my obsession with the details and minute improvements of applications to be somewhat embarrassing. For my part, I think that makes them perfect beta testers.

I brought in a Web designer, a pro photographer, a third-year medical student, a senior congressional staffer and an Interscope-signed rock drummer. That's a pretty good range of the geek spectrum, and only one is as OCD about apps as I am.

To my delight, the adoption was instantaneous. Everyone remarked on how the faces and simple bios, as well as the graceful, in-line photos, created a feeling of being together. When I explained that the goal Yobongo declared at launch was to bring new people together based on location, they understood. You could meet people here and then keep in touch with them, as well as bring your outside friends into the conversation.

Some Compromises

I won't overlook the negatives. Some of the less native-feeling functionality had downsides that put a few bumps in the road. All my guinea pigs friends were frustrated by the app's tendency to refresh when launching instead of bringing you back to your last screen. This morning, I noticed that the performance was a bit faster, and I could leave the app briefly and get right back to where I was. It doesn't feel all the way native yet - though Elston assures me it is - but it's getting there.

Another feature we want is access to the address book on the front screen, so we can invite our friends straight into private messages. As it is, you have to invite them through a private room first, and then you can message them. Presumably, when the beta period is over, the prominent 'Feedback' button can be replaced with this. In the meantime, Yobongo feels like exactly what it is: a work in progress by creative people who are open to suggestions.

Beta, But Beautiful

The global Yobongo room is clearly labeled as a beta, and the local rooms for your location are still in the menu, even if they aren't open yet. So Yobongo currently feels like a sandbox. That is to say, it's childlike, a little messy, playful and fun. Meet people, mess around, take pictures of your burritos, who cares? Talking to strangers in IM is good practice for real life.

I met Elston for coffee in San Francisco last October, and we discussed awkwardness. That's the problem he was talking about solving with Yobongo. Awkwardness is in the mind, we agreed, and communication is the cure. Text messaging is awkward. It's hard to type with thumbs, auto-correct can be hilarious and embarrassing, and, with groups, it's hard to tell who said what. The little touches of Yobongo warm up the medium.

My friends and I planned our whole New Year's Eve in our Yobongo room. And now that we're starting to fly back to our respective new homes, we're still using it, sharing little updates and hanging out live with one another for a few minutes at a time. It's almost like we never left.

iPhone Is Just The Start

Thanks to Yobongo, Twitter, Instagram and a little bit of real life, I've gotten to know some of this team. The Yobongo people care about quality. They meditate in the office. They wouldn't make compromises without a reason. So I know there's something behind this functionality, the reconnecting on launch, the email and SMS invitations, things that the iPhone can do more natively, but Yobongo doesn't.

"I'm just going to ask this straight up," I said to Elston. "Is all this Web and email and SMS stuff setting the stage for a cross-platform adventure?"

"iPhone is just the start," he replied. He followed with the Yobongo mantra, "We want to help people communicate more efficiently," and then he changed the subject. "Standing in line for a burrito," he said, and he sent me a picture.

If you have an iPhone, visit the App Store and try out Yobongo with your iPhone-wielding friends. See if it's as natural for you as it was for me and mine. And non-iPhone folks should stay tuned, because that burrito pic was some serious sleight of hand.

How do you communicate with groups of friends at once?

The chat list still shows your most recent contacts, rather than your full list, and you can use the search box to find people who don't appear. According to Google+ support documents, the chat relationships you had before this update are preserved and take priority. For example, your existing block list still applies. The order of contacts might appear differently in different places, but this Google+-enabled chat now applies across the board.

Learn more in Google+ help.

Do you use Google Chat to talk with your friends and colleagues?

Yobongo users can now add photos to the conversation. The app creates mobile chat rooms based on location, allowing users to chat with real people nearby, even people whom they've never met before. With Yobongo 1.4, they can now snap (or upload) a picture of where they are, and it will be instantly uploaded into the chat room. With messaging and photo sharing services rolling out from every major player, these features seem to strike at the heart of the iPhone's functionality. But Yobongo stands out from this crowd, because its purpose is to help people meet and discover each other. "We started Yobongo to help people make new connections and communicate more efficiently," says CEO Caleb Elston. "Now we are going to help people communicate even more emotion."

To identify participants, Yobongo displays avatars, real names, short bios, and a small profile space asking what a user is currently pondering. The smoothly designed user experience feels almost native on the phone. Using Yobongo already felt personal, and the addition of photo sharing will bring everyone in the chat closer together, whether they're comfortable with that or not. Yobongo makes it okay to talk to strangers, because, if it works as intended, they won't be strangers for long.

The Town Hall

One reason Yobongo has been so quiet, though, is that the service is only available in a few key areas. Yobongo is currently only open in San Francisco, New York City, and Austin, since its SXSWi debut. If you run the app from anywhere else, it displays a screen that lets you vote on Facebook and Twitter for your community to be next. On July 27, Yobongo held a "town hall," allowing eager iPhone users outside of its three pilot cities to try the free service for the first time.

Participants in the town hall were eager to learn when and where Yobongo will launch next. Co-founder and CEO Caleb Elston said they had "no timeline to announce now," but that the team is "committed to getting the Yobongo experience to more people."

Elston said they held the town hall in order to "get feedback from users about the Yobongo experience, answer any questions they may have, and give people a sneak peek of how the app works currently."

He found that interest was "an order of magnitude bigger than we anticipated," which actually caused capacity issues that delayed the event for a few minutes.

It was an interesting choice to call the event a "town hall," since it was actually a special exception to the service's local limits, and participants were from all over the United States. Members of the Yobongo team asked how users liked "chatting with people from all over." The consensus was that the experience was personal enough that it felt almost local.

Even though the participants were divided up into multiple chat rooms, which Yobongo does automatically to keep the chats from getting flooded, the team, including both co-founders, floated between rooms and was responsive to questions and comments from everyone. I asked Elston if he saw any overarching themes between rooms, since I was only able to participate in one. He said, "People were talking about Yobongo, their day, the tech news of the day, recent movies they saw, their desire for coffee," in other words, a perfectly normal day on Yobongo.

Making Connections

Yobongo wants to serve a local purpose, which is why it has targeted big, dense cities with high iPhone penetration first. Many town hall participants were from rural areas and wanted to know how the service's definition of "people nearby" would affect them.

Elston said the team was using the town hall to explore those kinds of questions themselves.

"As we think about expanding to more places," he said, "we want to ensure there are people to connect and communicate with, and so the strictness of 'nearby' is important to understand and test."

Other participants asked about possible business models, and the team, while not offering specifics, was open to the conversation. Town hall participant Michael Stancil asked, "If I'm a local pizza shop, could I sponsor a channel within a 5 mile or so radius of my shop?"

Kasper replied, "That's definitely a possibility."

Talking to Strangers

Yobongo's insistence on talking to strangers does not appeal to everyone, but I found the experience quite natural and enjoyable. One of Yobongo's most distinguishing offerings is its potential to turn nearby strangers into real-life friends. I asked town hall participants about their views on using Yobongo to meet people in person, and the responses were unanimous. Brent Byington said it was "exactly the point! Love it!"

In considering where and when to launch next, Kasper said the key factors were population density, iPhone penetration, and the number of votes on Twitter and Facebook. Kasper said they're thinking about revealing the vote standings soon.

Yobongo is free, it's different, and it challenges our comfort zones. If you're an iPhone user, download the app, and if you're outside of the pilot areas, vote for the privilege of trying it (especially if you're from Portland, Oregon). Other social apps are designed to keep bringing you back in. Why not try one designed to draw you out into the world?

Do you like the idea of chatting with new people nearby?

There's the character limitation, of course. There're the restrictions on DMing those who don't follow you. And if you have email notifications set up, there's the annoying influx in your inbox when you try to hold a conversation via direct message.

A new service launching today aims to leverage your Twitter network in order to build a better instant messaging platform. Joint lets you chat with those in your Twitter network - but it doesn't use Twitter to do so.

To IM someone via Joint, you can send them a message - either through an @-message or through a DM - asking that person to join you on Joint. That message includes a link that, once the Joint client is downloaded, will open to a one-to-one chat.

Similarly, Joint allows you to create chat rooms so that you can have instant-messaging capabilities with groups of people as well. These rooms can be either public or private. The chat rooms do not persist - in other words, once the last person logs out of Joint, the room will disappear. However, each user does have a permanent web address linked to their account, so that others can find which room(s) they're currently in.

Joint believes that this new tool could be utilized by brands and community managers in order to have real-time conversations with users outside the Twitter stream. This could be either on a one-to-one level for problem resolution or a large-scale chat room. But there may be any number of reasons why people might want to take their Twitter network and leveraging those social connections, have conversations elsewhere.

You can download the Joint client here and give it a whirl.

With SXSW well under way in Austin, Texas, the servers behind apps like Beluga, GroupMe, Kik and FastSociety must be working overtime. After all, people like talking to their friends, right?

In this same batch of apps, we've seen another phenomenon, though - apps that make it quicker an easier to talk to people you don't know - and we have one big question: Do people really want to talk to strangers?

For Yobongo, the value proposition is that a group chat room based on your location and a number of other signals can make it easier to meet the people around you. Co-founder Caleb Elston distinguished Yobongo from other group messaging apps, explaining that "those products are focused on organizing your close friends around very specific topics or events. We are focused on ambient real-time communication with real people you may not even know."

Ask Around, on the other hand, is "a location-centric app that lets people join, save and share conversations taking place in their immediate vicinity." The basic idea here is that the people around you can offer a value that services like Google cannot, based on the simple fact that you have  common location. Why is the train stopped? Google might not know, but the person five cars up might.

So let's look at these two scenarios a bit more: Yobongo wants to make it easier to meet people around me by breaking the ice a little bit and Ask Around wants to help out with local search by providing a way to quickly ask people around me questions in real time.

Say I go to the bar and I'm the shy type. I sit down, order a beer, and whip out my trusty iPhone. I open up Yobongo and I see it says I'm chatting with 10 people near Austin. How long do I sit at the bar and chat with people on my iPhone before the ice has been broken enough to overcome my shyness and finally say "Hey, let's cross the room and talk face to face"? Since this is a chat based around location, it's also very real-time. There's only so much time before one of us potentially moves on to another location and makes the jump from one room to another.

Here's the thing: if I'm the type of person that can't go to a place and meet people face to face, is two seconds of chatting on my phone really going to break down the barriers of introduction enough to get past that? I'm not so sure it is.

Now, Ask.com says that Ask Around can be the service I go to when I want to know about what's going on around me.

We saw some of this location-centric chat behavior evolving naturally in our flagship app and took the hint that there was real interest in having a discussion with those people around you.  Launching Ask Around as a separate app dedicated wholly to this use case lets everyone explore the shared experience of location. Want to have a behind the scenes conversation with friends in the bar? Predict the next play in the game to those watching it with you? Find out where off campus people are heading tonight?  Discover what the crowd across the street is looking at? Ask Around is the app for that.

With Ask Around, the group conversation is entirely public - just as with Yobongo - so I'm not sure how much I would use it for a "behind the scenes" conversation, but what about the rest of these ideas? Do I want to predict the next play with people around me? Is this supposing that I'm at the game or a sports bar? And if so, why does the location actually matter? It would seem we're talking about a topic, not a location. And if the crowd across the street is looking at something, why not cross the street and look yourself?

The biggest question for a service like Ask Around is, who is on the other end? When that hypothetical train stops, do we all jump on Ask Around to talk to people in our immediate location? The idea seems to be based around asking questions to people in a vicinity, but is a location a strong enough bond to get strangers communicating? And if everyone goes on there to ask questions, who's doing the answering?

So, the question really is with group messaging for strangers - how do you keep both parties interested on both ends? What's the incentive to keep Ask Around running on your phone if you don't have a question? For Yobongo, is a mix of location and social signals enough to match user expectations and bring the serendipitous connections promised?

Bringing location explicitly into the formula of communication with strangers is a relatively new thing and we're sure to see more of it, but we're not so sure that it's there quite yet. What do you think? What apps have you seen that do it just right? Has Yobongo brought you serendipity or Ask Around information you wouldn't have otherwise found? So far, it hasn't for me.

Last fall, when Kik Messenger launched for iOS, Android and Blackberry, I quickly urged my friends to download the app and quit costing me an arm and a leg in SMS fees. The Kik honeymoon lasted but a short while, however. Soon enough, I was in love again, but this time it was all about spreading the love - Beluga had come along and shown me the ways of free, SMS-style messaging with groups of friends.

Today, Kik has come a-calling again, trying to woo lost lovers like myself with the feature we've all been talking about - group messaging.

I don't know about you, but it's not often I want to message all my college friends at once. Or all of my soccer friends at once. Or everyone from work at once. But these other apps force me to do just that. It turns what could be a dynamic conversation into a mobile message board: "Ted: soccer game at 8 guys." "Mike: Ok." "Joe: Cool." And then silence.

With Kik, we wanted to create a product that allows you to have a real time conversation with one or more people. We wanted to allow conversations to expand and contract naturally, just like they do in real life. And we did just that. In Kik you don't create a group, you just add someone to the conversation...instantaneously.

When I look at an app like GroupMe, which focuses entirely on group communication, I can see that the point is a valid one. Just to get started, I need to create a group and name it. With Beluga, it's slightly different, as I start by adding the people I want to communicate with, whether one or many, and have the option to add a group picture, name and description afterward. I don't need to think about the why or what, just the who. At any point, members may be removed or added from the conversation.

Kik's group messaging feature allows for up to 10 people in a chat, boasting speed as one of its standout features. Competitors llike Beluga and GroupMe stand apart, however, by showing a map of all members of a conversation and including non-smartphone owners by using SMS.

The success or failure of apps like Kik come down to one big thing - do your friends use it? For me, the SMS inclusiveness of Beluga and GroupMe are a big factor. Both Beluga and GroupMe also make it simple to invite friends - just add their names and the app sends them an SMS. With Kik, on the other hand, the process is a bit more convoluted. Kik may make the group creation process quick and easy, but if I need to invite my friend and wait for them to download and install the app before communicating with them, I'm going to go with Beluga or GroupMe every time.

With the South By Southwest Interactive festival just a couple weeks out, everyone is asking "What will be the big app this year at 'South By?'" One genre we've all been looking at this year is group communication. Apps like Beluga, GroupMe and Fast Society are getting a good bit of pre-conference clamor for their utility when trying to coordinate with multiple people.

Another app, called Yobongo, is getting some attention too, but not because it will make communication with folks you know easier, but because it will help you with communicating with folks you don't know who are nearby. All of it, however, hinges on one key, yet-to-be introduced ingredient - Yobongo's special sauce of location and "ambient real-time communication."

After playing with it, we can say that it has a slick design and is great as a group chat app. But who needs another one of those? (For a full review of the usability, take a look at Louis Gray's take on how Yobongo has made his iPod touch a welcome member of his normally Android-only world.) In terms of competing as a group communication tool, it doesn't come close to apps like GroupMe or Beluga. It may look nice, but those apps are intended as group communication tools and have features like pictures, separate user-created groups, SMS-inclusion and even GPS location of each member. But Yobongo isn't meant to compete directly in this realm, right?

Yobongo co-founder Caleb Elston says no, Yobongo is something different.

"Those products are focused on organizing your close friends around very specific events or topics," explained Elston. "We are focused on ambient real-time communication with real people you may not even know."

"Ambient real-time communication," huh? That's a nifty phrase, but what does that boil down to exactly? It's this whole "location" business that, we hope, will really set Yobongo apart from these other apps and make it unique, but it's the only part we have yet to see. It's the secret sauce that we're looking forward and, in our opinion, the thing that will make or break Yobongo. Here's how Elston described it:

Our primary concern is connecting people with other authentic people, location is the fulcrum of the discussion, providing context for discussion. When lots of people are using the app, there will be multiple groupings of people, and that is where other signals are used to create an even more engaging experience.

The experience will continue to become more and more local as the app scales. Right now much of the discussion is about San Francisco in general, but soon there will be conversations at the particular neighborhoods or even particular events that are happening right now.

How will the app work at SXSW when, if everything goes to their plan, hundreds if not thousands of people are using it in a one square-mile radius? That has yet to be seen. For now, it's a great little group chat app. We're hoping that dab of special sauce takes it to the next level.

In the meantime, take a look at the interface and a quick promo video and see Yobongo's vision of "ambient real-time communication." We can't wait to really try it out. For now, the app is in private beta, but Elston says it should be available to the public by early March...just in time for spring break for geeks, err, I mean, SXSW.

Hotmail may have three times as many users as Twitter, but it's looking for something that may not be as easily quantifiable - the cool factor of  Google's Gmail. That's something that Microsoft has been working on for a while now, with a full redesign of its email client last year.

Today, the company announced that it's adding another bit of cool to its 350 million member email system - full chatting capabilities with Facebook's 600 million member network worldwide.

"While Gmail beat us to bringing their own chat into the inbox," writes Craddock, "we have now gone a step further and brought both our own chat and Facebook chat into your inbox."

Take that Gmail.

Being serious, though, most integrations like this have one exciting thing in common - they're good for the end-user. The feature lets users on both ends - those logged into Facebook and those on Hotmail - communicate seamlessly with each other. Gmail only has Gtalk and no Facebook.

According to Craddock, the response to the feature has been good since it was first announced last September.

"Since announcing the availability of Facebook chat in Messenger worldwide two weeks ago, nearly 2.5 more million people connected their Facebook accounts to Windows Live, bringing the total to over 20 million customers," writes Craddock. "And with three out of four Hotmail customers using Facebook, we expect that many more people will want to take advantage of this feature, now that it's available from your Hotmail inbox."

If  you're a Hotmail user and haven't yet tried out the feature, all you need to do is connect your Facebook account to Windows Live and check the box for "Chat with my Facebook friends in Messenger."

Bosworth's initial response to the Quora question said, "If people don't want to chat with a group, why are they a part of that group? Do they find it valuable or should the re-evaluate? Surely, at any given time we might not be inclined to chat but if you never want to chat I think that says something." But his response was updated to say that the opt-out has been added. Although leaving an annoying group is still, of course, an option.

The Android app offers private persistent chat rooms of up to 500 users per room. The app also offers a personal translation option when not in a chat room. But as the need to communicate globally is increasingly real-time, it's the ability to chat that makes the app useful.

LinguaSys is a machine translation company and the new app uses the company's technology to "provide higher accuracy and produce superior comprehension in the translation of complex corporate short-life communications including text chat, e-mail, web pages and documents." Initially designed as a translation tool for the military, the Android app brings this tech to the international business community.

But as machine translation can be notoriously mediocre, the pressure will be on this app to not just provide quality translation, but to do so in real-time.

When the company first introduced group chat in May, it limited the number of participants to five, but now it has doubled that number to 10.

Note that everyone in a group video call now needs to be running this version, so if your friends, family or colleagues are using Beta 1, they'll have to upgrade before you can include them in group video calls.

In addition to the increased video chat features, the second beta of Skype 5.0 brings a "refreshed user interface" along with a Skype Home "where you can follow your contacts' mood messages, set your profile picture and mood message, receive account notifications and learn more about using Skype."

While the company says it has fixed some stability issues, it notes that this is still a beta version so some bugs are to be expected. The second beta version of Skype 5.0 is available for download now.

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.

The next in line include "gayteen," "girls" and "milfs." Notably absent are "19th century French symbolist poets" and "chiasmus."

Since you can, apparently, create a new channel by adding a subdomain, we'll try to rectify the obsession with gettin' it on by creating a topic channel for a passionate but neglected group: Those who wish to engage in spirited debate over whether Robert Kagan or Francis Fukuyama is cooler. We don't think it will come as too much of a surprise when "Robert vs. Francis" overtakes "milfs."

Do you?

Read more Chatroulette coverage from ReadWriteWeb.

As Envolve's marketing materials point out, "websites are lonely places." While we can go to Twitter and Facebook to discuss a site, there is often very little real-time interaction between users on the site itself (except, of course, when site owners use a real-time commenting system like JS-Kit's Echo).

What makes Envolve so interesting, is that it allows you to create numerous topic chat rooms on your site. This, for example, allows you to create one room to answer customer service questions and another that allows users to discuss a specific product or a new feature you just launched. By default, all users remain anonymous, though they can opt to use their real name or even create an Envolve account. The service also features private chats and the ability to block abusive users. Admins can also permanently ban any user.

Pricing

Installing the service is as easy as copying and pasting a few lines of code into your website's HTML template. The company also offers a plugin for Wordpress sites. For small sites, Envolve offers a free plan that supports up to 5 simultaneous users. Paid plans start at $9 per month for up to 10 connected visitors and go up to $99 per month with support for up to 200 concurrent visitors. All of the paid and free accounts also feature real-time visitor statistics and the ability to customize the color of the chat rooms.

"Think of SkypeKit as a 'headless' version of Skype - that is, a Skype client with no user interface that runs invisibly, not only on PCs, but also TVs, notebooks, and other connected devices," the company said in a blog Tuesday morning. "Developers communicate with SkypeKit through the SkypeKit API, surfacing Skype calls through their own applications."

What About Mobile? What About the Web?

The new SDK is only open for desktop app development and for integration by consumer hardware manufacturers. Skype says they are aware of demand for an SDK for Web developers, but has "nothing to announce at this time." As far as mobile goes, smartphone users can already download official Skype apps, but mobile chat clients may be left out of the development fun until the SDK is expanded.

It seems likely that Skype will make its SDK available on Web and mobile platforms eventually, since the company's idea is "that every connected device can become a communications device, with the addition of SkypeKit." For now, desktop developers and hardware manufacturers have the chance to create some interesting Skype integrations with the new SDK.

The app allows users to instant message their friends list, view and comment on friends' photos and status updates from Windows Live, Facebook, and MySpace,see what their Messenger friends are sharing via Flickr, YouTube, and other social sites.

• Space to update status, follow friends and change profile picture
• Email in-box button
• Buddy list
• Chat screen
• New chat notification
• Photo and gallery screen

According to CNET Reviews, an initial foray into WLM use on the iPhone was stymied by intermittent crashes.