

Chatterous (YC winter 08) connects your friends via SMS, IM, email, and web - tlrobinson
http://mashable.com/2008/03/07/chatterous/

======
arasakik
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 :)

~~~
mixmax
You're certainly good at marketing speak...

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

------
bootload
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?

~~~
sharpshoot
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.

~~~
bootload
_"... 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?

~~~
wwhchung
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.

~~~
bootload
_"... 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?

~~~
wwhchung
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.

------
thorax
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.

~~~
thorax
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!

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

~~~
arasakik
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 :)

------
jrsims
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.

~~~
tlrobinson
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.

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immad
congrats guys! looks slick

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

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

It allows people to remain hyper connected.

------
rokhayakebe
okay? I think i am missing something...

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

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

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

