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Testing Meebo web chat + Ustream

Ustream test:

Test “social stream”

http://www.meebo.com/rooms

Choosing Meebo

We were looking for a simple chat solution for a few of our websites, and wanted to check out Meebo. The window that is embedded here is for the radio channel and community over at nrk.no/mp3, where we combined the chat from meebo.com with a webcam solution from ustream.tv. (visible on the front page only in the morning and afternoon).

My colleague Lars Haugdal Andersen made a new adminfunction that lets the djs easily switch the chat/video on and off on demand, and the chat and stream is currently running it 6 hours per day, with about 60 very chatty users blabbering happily away! Good times for all!

Hardware

There is a laptop in the studio that runs the ustream flashapp from the browser. We are using a fairly cheap $100 webcam, but added an external usb soundcard between the laptop and the mixingboard to get better audio. It is not the best setup, but it works for testing purposes, you can hear some audio artifacts in the stream due to the cheap IBM line in, but this is something we can easily improve if we decide to continue the project. This is not a technical experiment by the way, we want to test if it works as a part of the radio show, the technical aspect is secondary.

Other chat solutions

Ustream which we use to host the video stream actually has a chat solution, but because of firewall-issues we couldn’t use it, so Meebo seems like a good substitute. The firewall also makes IRC problematic choise. There are others to choose from, or we could even create our own chat using Flash Media Server, but for now we will stick to Meebo.

Some observations about Meebo so far:

The design is nice, fairly clean, and we love the solution for posting links, images and video, it makes it more more fun for everyone. On one of the sites, NRK Urørt, a site for unsigned Norwegian bands, we want to encourage users to post links directly to their songs as mp3, or to their music videos. Meebo remembers all the latest postings, making it very easy to get a discussion about music going. At least in theory, we have only a few days of experience to gleen from :). But so far, I heartily recommend Meebo for light applications, personal chatrooms, etc at least.

My only reservation so far is that there seem to be a bit of spamming, there is always someone popping in to ask for private msg “with horny naked latinas etc”, which is a pain. Meebo does have warning and ban function, and buildt in dirty word filter (in english), but seem to lack floodcontrol and systemwide autokick etc, stuff that is vital to have if we are to keep the chats on topic and free of spam. We have a choice to close the chats off with passwords, but we preffer not to, it should be as open as possible, but if the spamming gets worse we will definitely need to close it up a little bit more. I think the problem is that all the chats on Meebo are searchable, I miss an option to hide the chatrooms, so that we don’t get random english users popping in all the time.

A spam-solution: With some help from Ted Lee from Meebo Lars had made a script for working with the Meebo api, where you can set each chat to featurable and searchable to false, and this has reduced spamming to basically nothing. I would suggest to Meebo that they make this the default setting for a chat room, and that they include these settings in the webbased admin, inputting this though a php script is pretty bad gui.

Another negative issue is related to whether or not you want to show the sharing section of Meebo in your chat. There is actually no setting for turning it off, it is entirely based on the size you choose for the chat itself, so we had to experience with the with and height a bit, and actually had to choose dimensions based on Meebo limitations and not on how we wanted things to look.



The last issue is related to showing when people join or leave the room, there is actully no way to switch this off. Because the chat at nrk.no/mp3 is placed on the frontpage of the site, there is ALOT of people entering the room and leaving, all the time, which is rather annoying, and actually redendant information since you can see all the nicknames of people attending on the left side of the chat. A simple variable in the embed-code should be enough to switch this off.

Fantastic support!

Big plus and thumbs up to Meebo for superfast response time to questions sent about their api and other features, very impressive. I got an api key in just an hour or so, by email, and we are now looking into autocreating rooms and creating services around it. Hat off to Ted Lee over at Meebo! We salute you!

The api documentation could be more extensive though, and I miss being able to configure more of the chat through variables set in the embed code.

Next step

We will let this test run live for a while now, and see what we learn, and do some poking around with the api and different settings. I love testing new stuff in a real world environment, you learn so much more when you have real users to work with.

We might also play with the api to be able to autochoose nickname for people based on their login info, if we decide to continue using Meebo.

Ustream.tv

Our experiences with Ustream has been mixed, it seems a little unstable at times, users seem to get a “Buffering…” Message when viewing the stream embedded in nrk.no/mp3, while it works fine if visiting or page at ustream.tv . We discovered that you can click the Refresh button on the embedded video to make it buffer and play, so we simply wrote instructions for the users underneath the video, while we experiment with a more permanent solution. But this is of course a “bug” that is pretty crippling for the site, so I hope it can be resolved.
Another serious problem is that the controlpanel/stream sometimes won’t start at all. It is based on a browser plugin, and works for both IE and Firefox, and works great most of the time, but some days it simply won’t start the stream. A solution for this is to reboot the computer and run it all again, but we have set it up so that it is the dj who turns the stream on, and they really don’t have the time to bugtest and fiddle with things if they don’t work, so unless we see some improvement or at least more predictability in the way Ustream work we will probably have to choose another streaming-service.
But when it works, Ustream is simply great. The webbased control panel had alot of cool and useful features, and you can easily change the quality of the audio and video, adjust volume, invite collaborators, or administrate a poll that automatically gets updated in the embedded video. Pretty smooth! I heartily recommend testing Ustream for your personal projects, but do a beta before deciding to run it permanently on your site (of course :) )

Ps: Big tanks to Øyvind Solstad over at NRKbeta for recommending Ustream to us. We tested a few others but settled on Ustream, especially because of their superp control panel. NRKbeta has posted several articles about ustream.tv the first on in June 2007.

5 Responses to 'Testing Meebo web chat + Ustream'

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  1. ..kasta meg rett på omsetjinga av Meebo til nynorsk, eg.. Om eg/vi skal bruka Meebo sin chat, så må den jo finnas i nynorsk språkdrakt ;-)

    Hemo

    2 Apr 08 at 22:02

  2. Hehe, konge ;)

    Pappmaskin

    2 Apr 08 at 22:39

  3. Thanks for the thanks! =)

    Øyvind Solstad

    3 Apr 08 at 0:04

  4. Thank you for thanking me for the thank. More thanks, less tanks, that’t my motto.

    Steike du følger med på pingbacks altså det må jeg si.

    Pappmaskin

    3 Apr 08 at 0:12

  5. Hemo: Jeg ser at Meebo allerede er oversatt, var du så kjapp eller er det noen andre som har kommet deg i forkjøpet?

    http://wiki.meebo.com/doku.php?id=translation_norwegian_nynorsk

    Pappmaskin

    3 Apr 08 at 10:40

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