Gabbly – A Simply Chat Facility For Blogs
Posted by Brian Kelly on 2 Mar 2007
I’ve previously described how the Meebo plugin can be used to provide a chat facility for blogs. However its use requires installation of the plugin as a sidebar widget and users need to have a browser which support Flash.
An alternative approach would be to make use of a more native Web-based chat facility. One possibly would be Gabbly.
Gabbly’s approach is interesting – it provides a chat facility which is associated with a Web page (or, to be more accurate, with a URI). As an experiment I’ve set up a link which provides a chat facility associated with this posting. Why not try it. I will try and be around this afternoon (Friday 2 March 2007). There are a couple of recent posts which might be worth discussing: the difficulties of managing FireFox across an organisation and a more informal posting which suggested that the Web is now a difficult teenager.
So why not visit the chat facility and give your thoughts.
And let me know if you think a link to a Gabbly chat facility from this blog’s sidebar would be useful. Perhaps this could be achieved with a small image, to make the purpose more obvious (perhaps along the lines illustrated).
Please note, though, that it has been suggested that use of Gabbly (embedded within a Web page rather than the direct link I’ve suggested here) may have been responsible FireFox crashing on an Apple Macintosh platform – although this has not been confirmed.
UK Web Focus (Brian Kelly) 
Phil Bradley said
I’ve used Gabbly for a long time on my site, and while in theory it’s nice, there are multiple problems with it. First, you have to make sure that it’s somewhere that it can be seen easily, or it just gets ignored. Secondly, people don’t actually realise that they’ve been joined or signed up to it, so they don’t think that they’re involved with it. They particularly don’t recognise that they have a Gabbly chat name. Third, for it to have any particular value I think the site author has to be online and engaged with the chatter(s), or you just end up with a series of ‘hi, is anyone there?’ messages when people DO actually use it.
It’s great for taking people around to different websites though, and it’s an excellent training tool in that respect. However overall I’ve had much more luck with Plugoo in a week than with Gabbly in several months.