Anyone out there use a Meebo chat widget embedded in their webpage? Plugoo? AIM? Or any of the others? I recently heard about Hab.la and it is a little different than the rest. They even has a special features page just for libraries! The key difference is that the Hab.la widget will maintain the chat session with your patron, friend, site visitor, whomever, wherever they navigate on your site. The other nice feature is that as your visitor navigates, the URL of the page they navigate to is displayed in your chat window. I can see this being especially handy if you are trying to give multi-click directions to a page on your website, you can see the URLs as they go and make sure they do not go to the wrong page.
After reading through their FAQ I noticed that there is currently a limit on concurrent users: 5. For smaller institutions this probably wouldn’t make much of a difference, but I know from personal experience that I have had more than 5 concurrent virtual reference questions. The service just seems to be picking up and is a part-time project of 3 core developers, so perhaps once it gains momentum this number will expand to support a larger visitor user base.
You can monitor your Hab.la widget from any Jabber account (Meebo, Adium, Pidgin, iChat, etc.). For those of you not familiar with it, Jabber is an open messaging technology free from proprietary or corporate influence (AIM, Yahoo, etc.). Institutions can even host their own Jabber server if high security is an issue.
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Hi guys–thanks for the great (and very useful!) post!
Very welcome! I’m excited to see where the developers take this service–the capacity for more concurrent users would be a plus. Their system resources seem to be the crux of this issue, so I wonder if they were to make the application available for institutions to install on their own servers it would make Hab.la resources a non-issue.
Hey All,
We are looking for a few institutions (read libraries) that would be interesting in beta-testing a version of Hab.la with more concurrent users. We will eventually be rolling out a paid service, but anyone who participates in our beta can use Hab.la free for life
The best way to respond to me would be via our forum at http://www.hab.la/forum
-Ben
Ben, thanks for stopping by! I have forwarded your comment to a few libraries I know that may be interested in this beta test offer. I look forward to seeing the developments made with Hab.la–I’m specifically interested in seeing it flash-embeddable. Thanks!
do i need to have installed jabber to use Hab.la?