Olark (YC S09) Is A Dead Simple Chat Widget For Site Owners

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/19/olark-is-a-dead-simple-chat-widget-for-site-owners/

by dannyr • 17 years ago

52 17 17 years ago

techcrunch.com

dannyr• 17 years ago

I would use this for my site. However, Custom Branding is only available on their most expensive plan ($149).

I want custom branding but I don't need 10+ operators & 150+ simultaneous users.

I hope they would revise their plan offering.

bcx2• 17 years ago

Talk to us, and we can work something out @olark :-)

gojomo2• 17 years ago

Compare also Talkinator on the instant/free/no-frills end:

http://talkinator.com

johns2• 17 years ago

I can't take any site seriously that has a banner ad across the top of two cartoon chicks making out.

gojomo2• 17 years ago

As far as I can tell, Talkinator's ads come via Google AdSense -- so your heuristic could prevent you from taking seriously many sites!

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

Having a chat frame in your web page is really easy if you use WebSockets and can run a simple chat engine on your server (some hosting services don't allow sockets at all)

Since WebSocket is not available everywhere yet, use a Flash interface (pure actionscript, no visuals) with the same methods: onopen, onsend, onreceive, onclose, to communicate with the server. So when WebSockets is available all you have to do is replace the flash object with the real stuff.

  mychat = new WebSocket(chatserverurl);
  mychat.send("Hello");
  mychat.send("Can you hear me?");
  mychat.send("Am I getting through to you");

Don't get confused, the chat client is pure html, not flash, and can be easily spiced up with some jquery effects.

antonovka• 17 years ago

We've used Strophe to implement a pure-javascript/html chat like this (with an XMPP server on the other end, and jetty handling proxying of non-blocking asynchronous comet long-polling requests to the XMPP server).

XMPP supports this natively via its HTTP binding specification, and there are free open source servers such as openfire that will work with Strophe out of the box.

http://code.stanziq.com/strophe/ http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/index.jsp

mhunter• 17 years ago

Great team and product. Keep up the good work!

knightinblue• 17 years ago

The feedback button on the olark homepage directs to a getsatisfaction page set up under their previous domain name, hab.la.

Aside from this, anyone else like the name hab.la much better than olark?

bcx2• 17 years ago

I'd like some feedback on this to :-), it was a pretty touch decision to move from hab.la to olark.

flooha• 17 years ago

You made the right decision. As you said in your blog, it's nearly impossible for someone to tell you the domain name (hab.la) without spelling it out. Olark.com is pretty straigtforward. This is coming from a guy who can speak limited Spanish and has a Spanish wife. ;)

brianlash• 17 years ago

It's ready for iPhone chat out of the box? K, this is exactly what I've been waiting for.

I understand there are other developer-friendly chat services out there, but for a 'content guy' like me this is a dream. Not the first time a Y Combinator startup has empowered the everyday schmo to do business better. I truly appreciate YC and the companies it funds for that.

ntownsend• 17 years ago

Clean. Seemingly lightweight.

Using Chrome I had some issues with the resize handle of the input field. I could drag it to the right, out of the container, and off my screen where it became lost forever.

Also, I know that Chrome adds the resize handle itself, but having it on the lower right of the input text box is pretty counter-intuitive when you have about 15 pixels range for the cursor to control the height of the box.

Overall, though, well done. It looks like the Google Talk widget in GMail. That's a good thing.

pj• 17 years ago

I rolled my own chat widget for my website in a day. It was super easy using just javascript.

mrtron• 17 years ago

Seems at first glance a lot like chatterous' widget.

modsearch• 17 years ago

we use this on our site now, and its truly awesome. just be ready to chat with lots of people depending on how traffic is on your site :-)

Olark (YC S09) Is A Dead Simple Chat Widget For Site Owners

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