Chat Widgets

What we are going to start seeing is a meeting of the two services. Chat on your blog will become integrated with  the IM of your choice.

Lets say you are using Yahoo IM and you have ABC chat widget on your blog. There will be an option on that ABC chat widget for users to send you an IM. You, as the blog/widget owner will be able to control wether you get the IM and how you or your IM responds.

This will free you up to go other places without having to have one window open to your blog in order to catch any messages. Sweet! 

Plugoo.com (invite only beta as of 11/28/2006) offers a service similar to what I have described. I don't know the full details and how well it will work though. I don't have an invite.  

Visit Widgets Lab for more widget information and reviews. 

You won't have to chat through a widget on a website.

The IM widget will be an added service to IM. This will allow you to talk in real time with your blog visitors but at the same time maintain your  "buddylist" for friends and family.

I have been searching for this capability for months and figured Google Talk would be the first to implement it.

I would like to see Yedda capture a portion of this market. With Yedda's excellent usability and community, it would be a great fit.  (are ideas worth money?)

Derek 

My own personal view on this is that it makes perfect sense. Embedded chat widgets allow the bloggers who actually want to engage in a different kind of conversation with their readers to do this without compromising their privacy and without the risk of being flooded. 

There are quite a lot of "communication models" available right now - Wiki for collaborative work, blogs for one-to-many broadcast, blog comments for many-to-one, classic IM for trusted one-on-one, etc.

Embedded chat define yet another type of communication model, sort of a casual non-trusted one-on-one. Just like with any other communication model, this makes sense to a subset of the people at any given time, and it's good to provide them with this.

I guess that for me the perfect chat widget would support masking my real IM, separating my online status in my real IM vs. the online status in the embedded chat, and some kind of "flood-control" - "allow up to 3 IM messages a day".

As for Yedda, we will offer IM integration in the cases where this makes sense, though I don't see us getting into creating a general purpose embedded chat widget - focusing on creating the best place for sharing knowledge is already more then enough for us . I think that you will see us integrating this in the context of Q&A in some interesting ways in the near future...

And yes, ideas are worth a lot of money, but that's a topic for another potential startup .