Chatwing – Live Chat! 

I’ve been looking in to this new tool – Chatwing by Lujure which originally was/is an application that extends widgets to Facebook pages.  You can now Embed the ChatWing Shoutbox on your website to give your visitors a real-time communication tool.  Your very own website chatroom!

Free Application 

Its so simple to get and its free  – You just create your account here http://chatwing.com/ and then embed the code as a widget on your website or blog – I just used a text widget. Put the code on – and after a few minutes the chat box appeared.

This could be really useful if you post a blog which is likely to have many viewers that need to ask a question, as most people can’t be bothered to leave a comment but they might ask in the chat box, knowing that they could get a answer in real-time.  A great way to engage your readers or customers.

You can have 1000 users on ChatWing at anyone time, that might be rather busy but at least you know if there are 10 people it won’t be slow or lagging.  Apparently to make the Chatwing app stable, the dev team is conducting several maintenance checks and observation. In this way, technical glitches can be wholly avoided.

I like that you can sign in with your Twitter account or your facebook account at the click of a button – it puts your name and your picture associated with that account so you instantly know who you are talking too   I probably have too many widgets so this chatbox is far down on my page right now.  I’ve just stuck in on as a test, but say hello if you can see it.

Full customisation

There are a lot of options to customise your Chatwing shoutbox  – you can have a variety of colours, sizes, fonts and even have it as a pop out button if you don’t want as an enbeddable widget.

Advanced CSS Customization

For the advanced CSS users, you have the ability to edit and customize every aspect of your chatwing with CSS. Just follow the design guidlines and you’ll be good.

The only thing I haven’t worked out yet is if you can set notifications, because we are not always sitting with our website or blog page open. I see actually that there is a sound icon so that would probably be it.  An extension on Chrome would be awesome though.  You can also turn off the Chatbox if you are not going to be able to answer in real-time.

Worried about spam and bad language

Yes me too – However, as an admin, you can,.

• Set a profane filter
• Ban spammers
• Delete single messages
• Delete all chat message with one click
• Add moderators

Supported platforms for ChatWing are

Tumblr, Blogspot, TypePad, LiveJournal, Wix, Weebly, WetPaint, ESPN Fantasy Sports League Sites, Bligoo, WebNode, Lefora, Jimdo – any website that supports iframe.

• Your own company logo on the chat box
• Custom themes

I’m going to give this a go, I’ve never tried chat before on my websites so we will see what happens.  I’ll update here if anything outstanding occurs.