Olark (YC S09) Is A Dead Simple Chat Widget For Site Owners

I would use this for my site. However, Custom Branding is only available on their most expensive plan ($149).

I want custom branding but I don't need 10+ operators & 150+ simultaneous users.

I hope they would revise their plan offering.

It's ready for iPhone chat out of the box? K, this is exactly what I've been waiting for.

I understand there are other developer-friendly chat services out there, but for a 'content guy' like me this is a dream. Not the first time a Y Combinator startup has empowered the everyday schmo to do business better. I truly appreciate YC and the companies it funds for that.

Clean. Seemingly lightweight.

Using Chrome I had some issues with the resize handle of the input field. I could drag it to the right, out of the container, and off my screen where it became lost forever.

Also, I know that Chrome adds the resize handle itself, but having it on the lower right of the input text box is pretty counter-intuitive when you have about 15 pixels range for the cursor to control the height of the box.

Overall, though, well done. It looks like the Google Talk widget in GMail. That's a good thing.

I rolled my own chat widget for my website in a day. It was super easy using just javascript.

The feedback button on the olark homepage directs to a getsatisfaction page set up under their previous domain name, hab.la.

Aside from this, anyone else like the name hab.la much better than olark?

we use this on our site now, and its truly awesome. just be ready to chat with lots of people depending on how traffic is on your site :-)

Seems at first glance a lot like chatterous' widget.

Great team and product. Keep up the good work!

Compare also Talkinator on the instant/free/no-frills end:

http://talkinator.com

Having a chat frame in your web page is really easy if you use WebSockets and can run a simple chat engine on your server (some hosting services don't allow sockets at all)

Since WebSocket is not available everywhere yet, use a Flash interface (pure actionscript, no visuals) with the same methods: onopen, onsend, onreceive, onclose, to communicate with the server. So when WebSockets is available all you have to do is replace the flash object with the real stuff.

  mychat = new WebSocket(chatserverurl);
  mychat.send("Hello");
  mychat.send("Can you hear me?");
  mychat.send("Am I getting through to you");

Don't get confused, the chat client is pure html, not flash, and can be easily spiced up with some jquery effects.