Now with iGoogle video chat, the threat of the unwanted video chat is even more constant. For many iGoogle users, opening the main page is similar to opening a morning newspaper. Imagine opening your news feeds and having your boss or mother-in-law call you when you least expect it. Egad! We'll have to keep our homes clean, brush our hair and put on respectable clothing. And what about home office productivity? All of those precious morning minutes we spent mentally prepping for phone interviews will now be spent picking out an appropriate shirt.

If you're the kind of upstanding citizen that gets dressed before 10:00 am, install the iGoogle voice and video chat plug in and try it out. But if you're a nudist, self-employed hermit or hopeless slob, consider holding off until the community has established guidelines for etiquette.

Now, at least one team - the minds behind BabelWith.me - has developed the functionality into a cool, useful chat application that capably (if not perfectly) translates chats in real time. The service enables simultaneous communication in up to 45 different languages. It's kind of like the U.N. of IM.

The chat dialog shows both the original text as well as the Google-powered translation. Granted, the translations aren't perfect; Google doesn't know how to deal with "pig latin" or "pommes frites." But it's manageable and functional, for the most part.

We tested it out and do wish the program had a timestamp feature and some kind of notification or alert. Unnoticed chats went ignored with nary a flash, blink, or beep until we came back to the window or tab containing the chat room. We did love that the program gave both the original text (in orange italics) underneath the translated version. And of course, all the static text in the chat is translated, as well.

We were also told by the BabelWith.me team, "The launch was moved up to offer free multilanguage communication with those in Iran." Check out this chat set up specifically for discussion of the Iran election and aftermath.

BabelWith.me is a product of the non-profit organization LifeChurch.tv.

"SEO has been a great way for web sites to acquire new users, and will continue to be," said CEO Seth Sternberg in am email last night. "At the same time, site owners are looking for the next great way to attract additional users. i think that 'social graph optimization' can be the next SEO - making it really easy for your users to share content from your site to their friends, be they on social networks, IM networks, in email, etc."

Even cooler is the sharing option in the Meebo bar across the lower part of the screen. This feature enables users to share links via any IM service connected to their Meebo account as well as via Twitter, Facebook, and email. The feature reminds us a lot of Gmail Labs' addition of Google Search to email and chat.

This is what happens when the "Share" button in the Meebo bar is clicked:

Interested parties can get a closer look at features and functionality in this demo video:

Sites adopting the new tech from Meebo are expected to see significant spikes in user engagement. Partner sites announced today include Aeria Games, BakeSpace, Chictini, Fragegg, GamerNook, JamLegend, PlayedOnline, and SparkPeople.

The new Zoho Chat 2.0 is no dumbed-down client. It offers most of the features that you have come to expect from your IM desktop applications. You can send files, record your chat history, customize your theme, and more - just like regular IM apps allow. It does a few cool tricks, too. For example, you can type in a new event in the chat bar at the bottom of Zoho Calendar to create a new appointment on the fly. In Zoho Meeting, you can launch desktop sharing with others from within the IM application. (Windows only for now.)

The chat tool is also able to send you notifications from activities that take place within Zoho itself, including document sharing notifications, unread chat messages and more - definitely a handy feature. Future releases for chat include plans to introduce even more IM networks, most notably Skype.

This release represents a major upgrade of the chat application in Zoho. Current Zoho users can try Chat 2.0 here as of today: chat.zoho.com.

Besides the basic chat function, TinyChat also features the ability to add a badge with your chatroom status to your blog or social networking profile. You can also save a copy of your chat log by saving it as a text file, or by forwarding it to your email account.

Hidden Features: Choose Your Own URL and Private Chat

If you don't want to use TinyChat's cryptic names for your chatroom, you can also choose your own by just appending it to the TinyChat URL. If you want to send a private message, just click on the person's name and your message will be invisible to the rest of the room.

The chatroom concept does feel a bit retro, and it would be nice if you could receive some kind of audio or visual notification whenever a new message was posted to your room, but overall, the service just does what it say it does, and it does it well.

iPhone and Flash Coming Soon

Dan Blake, TinyChat's developer, tell us that they are also currently working on a simple iPhone app and a flash widget. If you like TinyChat, you should also check out TinyPaste (short URLs for long quotes) and iOJ (file uploading and sharing app) from the same developers.

With the new SynchroLive Communication platform, the service is now more scalable while keeping all live communications synchronized, no matter whether you're sharing audio, video, files, or web pages. This was one of the areas where Dimdim stumbled in the past. When we used it here at RWW for sharing our desktop with our readers during our testing of Chrome, the audio and video weren't matching up. That problem is, supposedly, no more. (We'll have to do another live demo and find out!) Says the company, the platform now makes it possible for five audio streams to be recorded, where before Dimdim only supported recording one.

The platform also allows for the new co-browsing feature to work. With this, a presenter can share their web browser with viewers who can then also be made presenters in order to browse along with the original presenter. The co-browsing allows for scrolling up and down, but does not track mouse movements, so it is not as good for using your mouse to point to an element of a web page. However, when you just want to share material on the web with a group - say, for example, a professor teaching remote students, it would be a good solution.

Open Source Dimdim, "Liberty"

Also launched today with the release of Dimdim 4.5 is the launch of "Liberty," the Open Source Community Edition of the new commercial hosted version. Liberty's complete source code will be made available under a GPL3 license with no limit to the number of attendees, meetings, or mashups that can be created. Liberty is also available as a downloadable VMWare Virtual Appliance.

The Open Source version also integrates with other web applications, including:

• Zimbra: Dimdim now offers a free zimlet for Zimbra's open source email system;
• Moodle: Dimdim is integrated with version 1.9 of Moodle's Course Management System;
• SugarCRM: Dimdim is integrated with the leading open source customer relationship management system,
• Claroline: Dimdim is embedded within with the collaborative learning environment.

More Enhancements

Those who have used Dimdim in the past will notice some subtle UI changes in the newest version including a smaller top frame and revamped menus on the left. Drop-down arrows have been added to those menus for easy access to files and shared web pages, too.

In the future, Dimdim will also allow for skinning changes and templates. Because Dimdim's service-oriented architecture is composed of a handful of different services (screen sharing, audio streaming, video, etc.), the platform makes it possible to use customize the look and feel of the Dimdim interface and create a template just for your needs. If you're only sharing web browsers, for example, you could turn all the other features off. The templates created by Dimdim users could then be shared with each other. Dimdim says these new features will be available sometime early next year.

In addition to the no-cost Open Source version, Dimdim will continue to offer a free version for meetings with 20 or fewer people. Dimdim Pro 4.5 starts at $99 per year for unlimited meetings plus video chat.

Powered by fast-growing web IM platform Meebo, these new chat widgets can be accompanied by multimedia that chat users can view together. In a world where the magazine industry has to be feeling some pain from sites like MySpace and Facebook, maybe magazines have to put a little MySpace on their own websites.

We're very bullish on Meebo in general but this campaign, the Seventeen Magazine implementation in particular, is pretty uninspiring. We hope that when Meebo makes an appearance on PopularMechanics.com it will be a little more interesting. That wouldn't be hard.

Meebo tells a good story about huge increases in time on site for publishers that install their chat widgets, and that makes sense. Chat gives people a reason to stay on one page, if it's done well and there are a good number of people chatting then it's genuinely more interactive than anything a publisher can offer by themselves.

Meebo has a history of offering an interesting mix of aiming at the mainstream while still innovating in ways that are thought provoking for early adopters.

Bringing web IM to big mainstream websites is an interesting step in the evolution of publishing. We think it makes sense. We hope the big publishers can figure out what to do with it.

The new chat functionality will work on PCs with Windows XP or Vista, as well as on Macs with OS X 10.4 or later. The plugin will work with all the major browsers, including Google's own Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.

We have not been able to test the video and voice quality of these chats yet, but we will update this post once we get a chance to try it out for ourselves.

Skype?

Interestingly, Google Talk, Google's desktop chat program does not have any video functionality yet, though Google enabled voice chat for Google Talk a long time ago. By adding voice and video chat, Google is clearly going up against Skype, which has made video chat one of its main features in the latest version of its software.

This incredibly customizable program lets you chat seamlessly across almost every IM network you can think of - the absence of interoperability becomes almost inconsequential after you sign up for an account on each service and tell Adium to log in to each. We are very excited about the upgrade.

Facebook Integration

We're not sure how likely to use Facebook chat we are, but we know that a lot of people do use it. We'll now be reachable that way too. By telling Adium to connect to social networking status messages, we're also now seeing peoples' Facebook status in Growl notification. That's pretty nice. Not something we'd want for Twitter, but for the less frequently updated Facebook messages that makes sense.

Effective interoperability with Facebook IM makes us think we should take our friend accepting a little more seriously there. Unfortunately, one known issue is that Facebook doesn't want to keep you logged in when you're also logged in via Adium. We hope that can be solved quickly.

Search

One of the most frustrating things about Adium has been that by tying together contacts lists across multiple services, it creates a very long aggregate list. It can be hard to find anyone in particular when you want to initiate a chat. No longer! The new version of Adium solves this UI scaling problem by bringing up a nice search bar when you hit the command-F keys.

There's So Much to Do With Adium!

Seven months in the making, this update to Adium is a big one. There's sure to be more on the way soon (many people are hoping that video and audio chat will be enabled someday) but in the meantime, check out AdiumXtras, the site where you can find all kinds of skins, plug-ins and other Adium fun.

Shouts and Whispers

Rejaw differentiates between sending out 'shouts,' which go out to all of your followers as well as the public timeline, and 'whispers,' which are direct and private messages.

At the bottom of the page, you can always see if there are any new 'shouts' or 'whispers' and clicking on those links will take you directly to the appropriate pages.

As is to be expected, every conversation on Rejaw also gets its own permalink and Rejaw also provides RSS feeds for all conversations.

Payloads

One very cool aspect of Rejaw is that you can just post links to images (we tested this with jpg and png files), YouTube and Google videos, as well as mp3 and flv files into your posts and they will immediately appear in a mediaplayer in your timeline. The team behind Rejaw is also responsible for Lingr, which uses the same technology at the back-end.

API

Right from the start, Rejaw offers an API to developers who want to integrate the service into their own tools.

Verdict

So how does Rejaw stack up against Twitter and its brethren? In trying out the service for a while this morning, we really enjoyed the immediate interaction with others on the site. We only noticed one minor bug with regards to deleting already posted messages on the site, but otherwise, the service feels extremely well thought out already and we didn't experience any other issues in our tests. We especially liked how easy it was to embed videos, pictures, and audio into the posts and comments.

If you would like to add me to your friends on Rejaw, you can find my profile here.

KickApps is currently being used by quite a few high profile affiliates, including NPR, ABC Family, as well as a number of professional sports teams.

Just about a month ago, Userplane itself announced that it was going to make white label plugins of its chat tool available for Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, as well as a number of other platforms. Userplane is already available on Friendster, Date.com, and MySpace.

Advertising

Interestingly, KickApps will feature "non-intrusive, relevant advertising on the chat and IM clients by Userplane." KickApps affiliates who would like to have more control over the advertising would have to go through an advertising buyout directly with Userplane.

IM for Web Sites

Just about a year ago, we prognosticated that IM for web sites was a trend worth watching. Since then, some of the sites we wrote about at the time, such as 3bubbles.com, have gone under, and others have failed to gain a lot of mind share. Even me.com, which now hosts Apple's MobileMe, was once supposed to host a white label social networking application. Clearly, it takes a large and established community to make IM within a closed off silo a success.

Quite a few of KickApps' affiliates are large enough to make IM a useful feature for their communities, though for most of its smaller affiliates, chat will probably be more of a gimmick than a useful feature.

There is a lot of movement in the web IM market. Just last week, Google launched its Lively 3D chat rooms for web sites. Yet, while this is a nifty application, it will probably remain a niche product for special occasions (if that), as few publishers have the number of dedicated and connected users who would actually want to spend a lot of time chatting with each other on IM.

In addition to the pop-out feature, Facebook chat, like any IM program, lets you appear "offline" if you don't want to chat. The conversations are private, and the chat sessions history is saved from page to page and between login sessions, but not permanently. You can also clear the chat history at any time using a provided link in the conversation window to do so.

Facebook Chat - Image from Inisde Facbook

Facebook Chat does offer one unique feature - it embeds your Mini-Feed activity into the conversation, in real-time, as it occurs. This is interesting, but why is this useful? So your chat can be interrupted with your score from that trivia game you were playing, revealing your inattention to the conversation at hand? This setting is on by default, so multi-taskers beware.

Now that we have Facebook Chat, where does this leave the other services whose existence practically depended on Facebook's lack of IM capabilities? One such application that comes to mind is Social.IM, whose claim to fame is that their use of Facebook's API lets you chat with your Facebook friends. Will they now try to compete with the integrated chat on a feature-by-feature basis or possibly revamp themselves as a universal IM program, a la Trillian?

Friendvox seems doomed too for the same reasons, but newly launched Babuki at least had the foresight to launch as a universal IM and social network client, letting you chat on the traditional IM networks as well as with your LiveJournal and MySpace friends.

Also on deathwatch are the two pages of instant messaging applications on Facebook itself, who will soon find themselves without any users, thanks to Facebook chat.

In the future, Facebook Chat may add Chat APIs and Jabber support, at least according to Facebook's Matt Cohler, but today's Facebook blog post made no mention of that.

Finally, with today's conversations happening more often on networks like Twitter, we wonder if we really need another IM. Will the addition of chat make you log into Facebook more than before? Probably not. If anything, it's just one more attempt to get us to play inside Facebook's walled garden - a place that is rapidly losing its appeal for many.

While going after the business networking crowd has never been an objective expressed overtly by the company, it does make sense. As Facebook's core early audience -- college students -- grows up, they'll need a more secure environment to network with colleagues and friends. Facebook is slowly positioning itself to be a place where both casual and business networking can take place at the same time, which means that rather than maintaining two accounts -- one at Facebook and one at LinkedIn or Xing -- users could stay at Facebook and use the tools they grew accustomed to in college.

The new privacy controls will reportedly be integrated with most features on the site, but we wonder if they'll extend to Beacon messages...

Facebook further announced a new chat feature. The chat will be one-to-one, IM-style, and integrated with the inbox (users set "Away" will get messages via the inbox rather than the chat app). The chat application is proprietary -- meaning you won't be able to connect to it via third party clients just yet -- and it won't have API access. Future Jabber integration is a possibility, according to reports. The chat client will be included in the new privacy controls, according to VentureBeat, so you should theoretically be able to restrict who can chat with you based on lists.

Also today, new numbers from comScore indicate that while Facebook still trails MySpace by a hefty margin in the US, globally, the networks are neck-and-neck. In January, Facebook served 100.7 million uniques worldwide, while MySpace received 109.3 million visits. That makes Facebook just 8% smaller in terms of unique visitors worldwide. Facebook is already serving more visitors daily on average than MySpace -- it became the leader in that category in November of last year.

Image from Facebook via CNET.

Initial partners for the Meebo Rooms Network are Revision 3, RockYou!, Piczo, Social Project, and Tagged. You can see the Revision3 implementation here, at which users can chat about a synchronized video feed of Rev 3 shows.

A comparison can certainly be made to AOL's Userplane, which also offers an API for their embeddable chat software (though not for free -- "integrated installs" start at $500), and a revenue sharing program. In fact, Userplane Money was announced just a couple of weeks after Meebo Rooms.

When Meebo announced their developer platform in the fall, we speculated that all manner of apps could benefit from having access to live chat. "By allowing third-parties to tap into Meebo's communication platform and users, the company's new development platform could actually be used to create intriguing web office applications," wrote Emre Sokullu in November. The same might be said for Meebo Rooms, which could allow developers to create interesting collaboration apps on top of the API.

An open API which turns Meebo's Rooms widget into a service could help put their chat technology into broader use and grow the network. By placing ads on the rooms and introducing a revenue sharing program, Meebo has likely found a way to offer a free API, make money from it, and keep developers happy. I've embedded a Meebo room the old fashioned way below just for fun: