Firef.ly

Date: 2008.08.05 | Posted by Jeff | Category: Geeking, Site Related, Social Networking | Response: 1

Firef.ly is a new service currently in beta created by Betaworks that turns any of your sites into a chat room. Before you say that you’ve seen this before listen here: There is no downloads. That’s right, two lines of code thrown into the footer of my coding (totally painless) and my site has now become it’s own chat room.

If you have a look at the bottom right of your screen, you should see a floating box with # Here, # Chatting, Start Chatting. Click start and the screen gets sort of an ‘overlay’ thing going. You can still scroll and look at whatever is on the site, but you can also move your mouse around and start typing. Where ever you type, it will create a little chat bubble that anybody else on the site can see.

Some of the extra features that look to be put in are the choice of pre-loaded cursors (because arrows are boring) and what looks to be the option to use an image of your own choosing (that doesn’t seem to work yet or I can’t figure out). There is also a twitter option to have certain parts of the convo go to twitter (again can’t get it to work). What IS working though is the time line feature. this allows you to scroll along the site’s time line and check out conversations from the past, which are conveniently marked with little white lines, turning the chat room into a nice form of bulletin board as well.

I really hope this service lasts, it seems to hold a lot of promise. What they really need now is to get a forum/blog going so we have some way to help them perfect this. They do have a blog, and it’s even listed at the bottom of the main page, I’m a tard. Thanks Andy. Anyway, check it out because it’s awesome. Remember to leave a message there when you check it out, I’ll be sure to see it.