Portable chatroom
Definition
We define portable chatrooms as widgets or portlets that can be embedded into a page, a blog or some portalware and that point users to the same chatroom.
Note: We may revise this definition or the article title at some point, for now "portable chatroom" seems to sound good - Daniel K. Schneider 18:32, 3 September 2009 (UTC).
- History
See also Talker (Wikipedia) and MUD for earlier and related light-weight virtual environments technology, shoutboxes, i.e. mini-chats embedded in the sidebar of a portal.
According to Wikipedia, the Virtual Places Chat system built in the mid 1990s adopted the paradigm that any web page on the Internet is a chat room – a Virtual Place – if one or more people are viewing the page with the VPchat program. A web browser is an integral part of VPchat. Below the browser window there is a chat pane in which the conversation text is displayed. Below the chat pane is a box for entering text for the conversation. To the right of the browser window is a list of people in the room.
Nowadays, several technical solutions seem to exist:
- Browser extensions
- Services that embed a page as an iframe (or similar) and add panels for chatting
- Similarly, services that insert avatars on top of the contents.
- Within a single portalware, e.g. an LMS a shoutbox can be used.
Underlying technology can be proprietary/ad hoc or use a protocol like [Extensible messaging and presence protocol XMPP].
Software
Web 2.0 services
I.e. widgets that you can embed.
Other
- Virtual Places Chat (Wikipedia).