Google Talk ChatBack Badge – Free chat for your website

Posted on March 13, 2008 at 6:04 am

Looking for a quick and easy way to chat with anonymous people on your blog or website? There are a bunch of freeware and shareware applications that you can use to add chat to your website, but probably my favorite so far has to be Google’s ChatBack Badge. It’s free live chat for any website and all you have to do is drop a couple of lines of code onto your web page.

As described by Google, a chatback badge “will let visitors to your web page chat with you. They’ll be able to chat with you whenever you’re signed in to Google Talk as xxx@gmail.com.” The key thing to note here is that you need to be logged into Google Talk, whether it be via Gmail or via the Google Talk desktop IM program.

If you’re logged in, a visitor to your site would see your Google Talk status as shown below:

Clicking on Chat with Aseem Kishore will bring up a popup window that loads a Google Talk gadget in the browser. The initiator does not have to have Google Talk installed on their computer in order to start a chat.

By default, the person trying to chat with you contact just start sending you messages unless you first accept the invitation to chat with them. You’ll get a message in Google Talk saying that someone clicked on your chatback badge and you will need to click on a link that will open a separate window for chatting.

You’ll now be brought to a web page that says in order to start the chat, you need to click Launch Chat.

Clicking on this finally brings up another popup window in your browser that simple has a tab for contacts and Guest Chat. You’ll also be given a warning message by Google as follows: “You are chatting with an unidentified user. Be careful what you discuss.” Now that is definitely true because you really don’t know what kind of crazy folk are coming to your site!

And that’s it! You can now carry on a conversation with live visitors to your site or blog! Personally, I find that exciting and useful for a site such as mine since I try to give computer tips, etc. I plan to install it so that if I’m online, people can ask me questions directly in real-time! Pretty sweet!

The only thing to note is that the guest chats are never recorded by Google, even if you set the option in Google Talk to store chat history. Another thing to note is that if you have multiple people trying to contact you at once, each will open in a separate window, it will not merge them together like in a chat room.

You can get started with your own badge by going to the Google Talk ChatBack Badge creator page. Then just copy the code shown below and paste it into the location that you would want it to appear on the site.

You can also customize a few aspects of the chatbadge such as the Title, your nick name if you don’t want your real name showing up, and if you want the status message to appear (online, offline, etc).

Note that if you want to be logged into Google Talk and not be bothered by requests, you can set your status to “Busy” and this will disable your badge until you change your status again. Your normal contacts will still be able to contact you.

Overall, it’s a really neat way to provide some cool interactivity to your site or blog! Create your own ChatBack Badge and try it out! Enjoy!

[tags]google talk chatback badge, chatback badge, chat for website, free chat for your website[/tags]

» Filed Under Google Software/Tips

Comments

3 Responses to “Google Talk ChatBack Badge – Free chat for your website”

seo company india said on : September 21st, 2008 at 6:41 am

Nice post…
I’m gonna try it on my website now..
Thanks for sharing..

Vivek said on : June 29th, 2009 at 1:21 am

thanks for post.. i have integrated it with my website, but, issues is that, i am not able to identify the unknown users, in the chat.

i have to ask them who they are or what’s their emailid.
is there a way to know their email or explicitly ask them to input email, to start the guest chat..

-vivek

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[...] it doesn’t require your visitors to install any application. This is very similar to the Google Talk ChatBack Badge from Google that you can use to chat with visitors to your [...]
November 20th, 2008 at 5:34 am