Monday, August 14, 2006

Updated Local Chat Gadget

Garett Rogers’ Local Chat gadget for the Google Personalized Homepage is now available in version 4. The tool allows you to enter your zip code to then talk to people in your area. Garett – author of ZDNet’s Googling Google – tells me:

I created this gadget because I believe the web has started melting communities together to create too much of a “global village”. The sense of “local community” is becoming less important, replacing it is “ online community”. This local chat gadget is only one thing that can be done to bring back this important piece of life.

What’s new in this version? Garett lists the following changes:

• Gadget works for both Google Desktop sidebar and Google Personalized homepage
• Brand new user interface (cleaner, better transition effects, etc.)
• You can ignore/unignore users now
• You can see who is in a the room with you now rather than just the number of people
• More reliable localization (based on zip/postal code)
• Auto link-detection so you don’t have to copy/paste URL’s if they happen to come up in conversations
• Local search feature using the Google AJAX Search API. To use, type "/search <something>". For example: "/search hotels" would find you places to stay in that location.

Updated Local Chat Gadget by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1)

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