inCircles - Concurrent chat groups people with similar interests
By Vivek | November 21st, 2006 at 01:34 pm ET
Last week inCircles launched their messaging platform that enables easy messaging with people viewing a website. inCircles detects a users presence on a website and enables them to communicate with others users having similar interests. Feature that adds real value to the widget is the list of ‘Popular Pages’ provided as part of the widget. Popular Pages list is sorted by the maximum number of users located on a website using inCircles. This can result in people being drawn to a website with maximum users, which can provide a big rush of people to your site if inCircles really catches on.
Installing the widget is pretty easy and straight forward. inCircles currently provides few options to customize the look and feel of the widget before you can grab the code to insert into your template. Once the widget is inserted in your blog/site, you get a nice and shiny flash based widget running on your site.
Users are assigned an auto-generated ID when they first land on a site using inCircles, which can be modified to anything to like. As you move along to other sites having the widget, it detects your presence and adds your ID to the list of people viewing that site. On any particular site you can choose to interact with a group of select friends, or have private one on one chat sessions. One thing I am not clear about why does inCircles suffix a number to my id as I move along to other websites.
Concept, execution, and privacy aside, I am not a big fan of ‘Most Popular’ things. Any time you give a generic list of most popular xxx which are not dependent on time or any other factor, you end up making the most popular even more popular. Take the case of Most Popular photos provided by a site. Have you ever see that changing?
Me.dium, which is in private beta right now, also has been working on a similar concept and provides a Firefox extension to bring together people with similar interests.
Links:
inCircles
on November 27th, 2006 at 5:01 am
I like this, it’s got most of the basics right. The other flash IM widgets require signups, etc… They’re worthless in my opinion.
on November 28th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
[…] What others are saying. Grain of Salt StartupSquad.com Monday November 27th 2006 Filed under: chat, flash, MySpace friendly […]
on December 27th, 2006 at 11:34 am
[…] Weezu is another startup offering chat services for users located on a web page. Earlier I had written about inCircles widget based messaging platform and Netscape’s use of Userplane to provide similar chat services. Besides these we also have Me.dium, which is currently in private beta mode, offering a Firefox extension to enable communication on a particular or similar webpage. […]
on April 30th, 2007 at 10:54 am
[…] I had written about InCircles.com last year when it had launched it’s widget based chat client through which users can chat with others on the page it is installed on. While the idea looked interesting to start with, but was not able to get traction with users. Why? ’Cause unknown entities don’t really have anything to exchange besides “test” or “asdfasdf” or “123123123″ or “hello”. Once those kind of messages start showing up, anyone can tell where the community effect is headed. Now the saving part here is that InCircles team has realized the shortcoming and planning on marking some serious upgrades to the widget. First among which is change of name. InCircles will become Pladeo in the next few days. As part of the real upgrades, the Pladeo widget will be able to manage content, play video, chat over video, create avatars, view profiles and communities. Unlike the previous anonymous user based system, Pladeo will enable creation of profiles while site owners will get access to sophisticated analytics tools to monitor all their video distribution activity, user demographics data, and dialog traffic. Later part of feature set is definitely dependent on how big the community grows. […]
on June 18th, 2007 at 1:08 am
[…] InCircles, which had changed it’s name to Pladeo recently, has also jumped onto the Facebook platform. While the idea of chat on a profile page might sound interesting, Pladeo has yet to fix the old issues of usability. […]
on July 10th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
[…] Webpage chat/file sharing dai.sy, Gabbly, Zpeech, Pladeo (formerly InCircles) […]