Chatterous (YC winter 08) connects your friends via SMS, IM, email, and web | Hacker News Reader

Chatterous (YC winter 08) connects your friends via SMS, IM, email, and web

mashable.com

37 pointstlrobinson23 comments

Hey guys, I'm one of the founders of Chatterous. I've created a Hacker News Chatterous group that can serve as a real-time backchannel for fellow Hacker News readers. Simply send your gtalk, email, sms or Chatterous username to questions@chatterous.com and we'll invite you to the group!

Also, an interesting story: While practicing our pitches we setup a Chatterous group for our fellow YC founders to provide real-time feedback for our presentations. It actually got to a point where people weren't paying attention to the presentations anymore and became immersed in Chatterous! We feel that Chatterous is super easy to use because of the fact that you don't need to navigate to our website, even as a Chatterous user - it's one of your IM buddies on gtalk, or an e-mail address, or an SMS short code. Think of it as IRC meets Twitter for the Hacker News community :)

You're certainly good at marketing speak...

And I don't mean that in a negative sense. Your enthusiasm shows through the medium.

Hmm better shut down mine it newsyc ~ http://www.chatterous.com/landing/newsyc/ Is there any way to find/view the output via the web ie: http://www.chatterous.com/landing/questions ?

Do you guys have an IRC backend? There's a #startups on freenode that you could probably link to...

Here is some observations after I created an account & tried it (in a very limited way) ~ http://www.chatterous.com/landing/newsyc/

- easily create account

- has unique url's (important if you want to cut+paste, send to others)

- email authorisation in reasonable time

- basic customisation (as expected) though no memorable default icon (think twitter, flickr)

- each post has unique url (good so I can refer to them in the future).

- not sure of post size limit (twit is 140 characters) what is chatterous?

- entry box needs a few visual feedback indicators (not important just yet) what will be clipped when sent to sms?

- links in comments are not rendered as links but text (how are long urls handled? tinyurl like twitter is bad - I don't know the solution?)

Only the creation side which always leads to the next bit convincing your friends that they need to get on board. From flickr to twitter, twitter to friendfeed this has been the bane of my life on any "social-service". I don't have any real suggestions [0] other than an observation on icons. Most of my twitter friends who I know from flickr use recognisable icons. So when I saw the icons on friendfeed I could sign them on immediately.

[0] All companies are suffering because of this. No company wants to give away their users friends list. Though the first company that allows easy access to friends will be my customer for life. When is this problem going to be solved?

You are wrong to suggest that you have to convice your friend to get on this. Your friends don't even need to be on chatterous to stay connected to you.

Chatterous is just social glue - they don't even bind you to the site.

"... You are wrong to suggest that you have to convice your friend to get on this ... Your friends don't even need to be on chatterous to stay connected to you. ..."

I missed that bit. How?

"... Your friends don't need to sign up Your friends don't need to sign up to chat with you! They can reply right on their im, email or phone. ..." ~ http://www.chatterous.com/faq/

Ah so users to contact a group "foo" would google mail, email "foo@chatterous.com", or "text CHTR foo <msg> to 41411" then?

How do they get the message? Do they still have to sign up to see it?

Nope. They will get an e-mail or SMS or gtalk message, and they would reply simply by replying to that e-mail/SMS/gtalk bot. Your friends don't have to sign up. But as the group creator, you need to add your friends' contact information to add them to the group.

"... Nope. They will get an e-mail or SMS or gtalk message, and they would reply simply by replying to that e-mail/SMS/gtalk bot. Your friends don't have to sign up. ..."

Ok, that solves the signup problem.

So you still need to get the contact details. Not as hard as getting friends to sign up. What is the advantage of non group creators (non-admins) signing up then?

You get the ability to direct your messages to what you prefer. Say a friend added your e-mail to the group. By signing up, you can route the messages to your gtalk or sms or web instead.

Would you consider creating a project at http://featurelist.org so I can submit some feature requests and we can vote on them?

Why can't GTalk addresses be anything but gmail/googlemail? I have accounts that are created using Google Apps and would prefer to use those rather than gmail addys.

Thanks, looks pretty neat so far.

Here's some example code in Python for talking to the GTalk servers to other GTalk-supported emails other than @gmail.com and @googlemail.com: http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/618

If you're connecting to talk.google.com to send the messages, you should be able to send to any logged-in user address. This feature is really important for our teams to use this tool.

So far it's very cool, though. Keep up the good work!

We'll definitely take a look, thanks for the info!

I also tried to check out featurelist.org, but it kept timing out. I'll try again tomorrow and let you know once we have a project created :)

So here's the question I have with sites like this: What are the legal implications of people submitting other people's personal contact info to the service without permission?

Are there not privacy laws that come into play here? Not saying Chatterous are up to no good - really, it looks like a terrific service - but you see what I mean.

What are the implications of people submitting other people's contact information to any other service, like, say porn or spammy sites?

I don't think it's Chatterous's problem, as long as they provide a confirmation email and opt-out procedure.

congrats guys! looks slick

I don't get what the website does. Can someone explain it?

chatterous routes messages between your friends irrespective of whether they are on IM, email or mobile.

It allows people to remain hyper connected.

okay? I think i am missing something...

WTF? I submitted that same idea (extremely similar) to YC as my secondary idea!

You're rightly being voted down, because YC doesn't fund ideas, they fund people (and they admittedly make mistakes).

yeah... i was simply voicing my opinion. i understand the premises for acceptance into YC. I wish the best for chatterous!

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