gabbly.com…instant back channel
Gabbly is way cool, and ought to be bought by Google (yes, that’s a prediction), or maybe Yahoo!
I’ve often thought about something like this, but always imagined users would simply link to the site and the referring url would be used to drop the visitor into the chat…but how these guys have implemented is way more practical. Relying on referring urls is problematic and being able to link to gabbly.com/http://surfarama.com means we can easily incorporate gabbly into blog templates and the like to create individual chat rooms for each post…love it.
Boing Boing should do this, but even if they don’t readers can easily do it themselves. I also imagined it would be super handy for conference attendees…just drop the URL for the conference page into gabbly and voila! an instant back channel. The possibilities are endless.
UPDATE: Yep, Gabbly is gonna be huge. The more I play with it the more I like it. Each of my posts now has a Gabbly chat link…so all three of my readers (Mum, that includes you and me!) can get together and chat about anything I write.
Of course I don’t ever expect that to actually happen, I just love that it could. Like I said though this will be killer for popular sites like Boing Boing, or Digg, or Flickr even. Or for communities surrounding conferences, or events with a web presence. Let’s just hope they can scale (which is where Google or Yahoo! could come in handy).
