Talk with your Blog visitors using Google Chatback

Ever thought of talking with your blog visitors? How they feel about your blog? What they expect there? Would you like to communicate with your visitors? But the question is - How? Google recently launched a new Google Talk feature that lets visitors to your web site to chat or talk with you. It called as "chatback” by Google because instead of you doing all the talking on your blog, your visitors can talk back to you. Sure, they could leave comments, but those are public and hard to use for a real conversation. With chatback, it’s a real instant message session. It opens in new window so user can continue with his other works on your blog.

To use chatback, the blogger must have a Google Talk account whereas it is not necssary for blog visitors. They don’t even need to have an email address, or to have ever used instant messaging. When they visit your site, they’ll see a badge/image like the one on the top right showing your online status (available, busy, offline) and, if you’re available, they can just click and start chatting. Chatback uses the web-based Google Talk Gadget so your visitors don’t need to download and install anything.

This chatback can be used anywhere, blogs, portals, static webpages, online profiles etc. You can use it on any web page that you can add HTML content. To get started, visit the chatback start page. Then just copy the provided HTML snippet to your web site. Visitors will then see a badge on your site indicating your availability, and can click to start a chat with you. The status which you set in your gtalk will be visible on the badge.

If you’re using a Google Apps account, you can create a chatback badge by visiting here where DOMAIN is the name of your domain. From the page, copy and paste the HTML into the page where you want the badge to be displayed. You’ll know it’s working if you see a large Google Talk bubble showing your current online status along with the message ‘Chat with [your name]’ (or whatever you selected as your badge title).

So what are you waiting for? Do you see me online ??