ChattyTime
ChattyTime is a project that came out of a conversation I had with a my Live Web professor, Shawn van Every. I really wanted to be able to send location-based information to a chat buddy without him or her needing to do as much as click on a link. Receiving information needed to be effortless. The final product became ChattyTime, an Firefox application that not only gives your chat buddy location-based results, but also gives all sorts of other information. Depending on the special character prepended to a word in an instant message, ChattyTime bluntly opens the resulting web page in the recipient’s browser without having to click on any links. The application also has full browser sharing capabilities.
ChattyTime was developed rather rapidly. About a week was spent familiarizing myself with the Mozilla platform and developing extensions, and the following two weeks were spent taking ChattyTime to a Beta phase. It was featured in AdAdge in December 2008. Blog entries posted throughout development are here. Also below is the original copy that can be found on the ChattyTime website.
ChattyTime adds some exciting new features to SamePlace, the award-winning, extensible instant messaging client and Firefox extension based on the XMPP (Jabber) protocol. It is compatible with AIM/ICQ, GMail, MSN, Jabber, and Twitter, and it has a Jabber service of its own.
ChattyTime allows you to open “gift” pages right in your friend’s browser. Search news, Google, the dictionary, YouTube, and translate English/Spanish for your friend. Now there’s no excuse to say, “Just Google it,” because this feature is quicker to type! You might also like the location-based search feature, which will give your chat buddy search results in his or her zip code.
The other major feature that we here at ChattyTime are pretty excited about is the ability to browse the web with your friends. It’s ubiquitous browsing. By turning the feature on, no matter who clicks on what, you and your buddy will browse the same web pages. Use this feature for conferencing, YouTube, holiday shopping, or whatever you want.
Special characters determine the type of gift page to be sent. For example:
~economy opens the Spanish translation for “economy”
=pterodactyl opens Google results for “pterodactyl”
@pizza opens results for pizza in your friend’s zip code*
Here’s the current list of special characters (also available in the ChattyTime option under Firefox “Tools”):
= for Google search
; for YouTube
@ for location-based Google search
# for dictionary
~ for Spanish/English translations
! for New York Times
- plus any URL to send any web page you want
To browse the web with friends:
- Each user sends :1 to begin session.
- One user sends :0 to end session.
Some notes on group browsing with this version of ChattyTime:
- You will send links to any opened chat window, so close the windows of the buddies that are not participating.
- You will share all your browser activity with your buddy. Of course your buddy will not have access to your password protected sites, but you will still direct him or her to those pages.
*To use location-based search function, friends much have Loki installed.