Talkinator
I just added an interesting toy to this blog, that I read about in an I, Cringely column.
It's called the Talkinator, and you can see it in the upper left hand of this page, in the Wordpress sidebar. (Of course, I may get bored with it sometime in the future, and take it down, it which case you're out of luck!)
It's a real time chat application.
What's interesting, is that it requires no log-in or registration at all. Just start typing and there you are. It seems to me, it could be a great way for different people who visit websites to communicate with each other. My site here, that you're on now, currently gets minuscule traffic, so it's not that useful. But imagine the potential for popular sites, like Mama Lisa's Blog! All the visitors could talk to each other about children's culture or nursery rhymes or whatever.
One thing I don't like are the user names that are automatically generated. On this site, it came up with names like "Sugarcats" and "BitingBubbles". Not too bad, but kind of silly. On another site I saw some in very poor taste, like "StinkyFarts" or something. I don't really mind stuff like that, but I wouldn't want to see that on a family friendly site like Mama Lisa. (Dav Pilkey would probably have no problem!) The box does include a little button that lets you change your user name, but I wish that was more prominent. Something like a permanent field where people could rename themselves would be great.
But, overall, very impressive and fun to experiment with!
