Over the past year our live chat feature within our dating sites have proven to be really popular. It attracts many members who come back every day to chat. It seemed natural to take this system and expand it further into a stand-alone chat system.

TALK.chat is our 100% free and 100% anonymous chatting platform.

What makes it different?

Google “Chat room” and click through the top 10 results. One thing that seems common with most of the resulting sites is an overall lack of quality and standards. Most of these sites use Flash based chat systems which can produce a lot of compatibility issues within today’s mobile connected world.

TALK.chat is fully HTML5 W3C standards compliant and scores 100/100 for mobile usability and 99/100 for mobile speed from Google Page Insights. We think meeting these standards is an important building block for any new website.

The chat system is also 2D responsive meaning that it adapts to device screen size both horizontally and vertically. The reason for this is to ensure that the maximum area is available for the conversation. Even the top bar that houses the room name is transparent so chat text is visible right until the last pixel of the display.

Live demo

Below is the actual chat system, this is not a screenshot. Just enter a nick name and test it out right now!

Anonymous conversations

We also decided to make TALK.chat anonymous and not require any user registration, passwords or email address. The barrier to entry is very minimal. Simply choose a nickname and start chatting. We feel that today people are looking for social systems that don’t capture personal details. We take this a step further by how the conversations are stored. They are held within server memory which means that site backups will never keep data and a server reboot or power-down would erase all data. In addition the chat data is automatically purged when it’s 15 minutes old.

The site also doesn’t use any Cookies bar the standard PHP Session ID which is used to remember your nickname as you move between rooms. When you close your browser this is erased.

The final piece to the anonymity puzzle is the site doesn’t have a single graphic so there are no images downloaded and stored in your local cache. The added bonus this provides is an ultra small footprint. The disk usage for the entire site 168K!

Webmasters

Owners of websites can also integrate TALK.chat into their own sites. Simply visit the site, create a room topic that matches your site and IFRAME the room into a page or blog post. Here is an example IFRAME code:

<IFRAME src='http://talk.chat/?r=lobby' width='100%' height='100%'></IFRAME>

Swap ‘lobby’ with the name of your room and you now have live chat within your site. This is an excellent edition to improve visitor retention.

Future plans

This is the first release of TALK.chat and future editions will include blocking members, gender selection, GPS location and much more. We are excited to be entering the chat room space and feel that we can push the functionality and usability to leading levels.