We recently launched our new members area. While it may look roughly the same, it is opening the door for us to do some very exciting things.

We will be developing things like optional profiles, accounts, friends, etc.. We have heard your requests loud and clear for better management of your account and better management of your channels. Part of this system allows for us to easily merge this data with your account so everything runs smoothly.

A few more notes- We want to apologize to anyone that had slow or no support when writing in. We hired a support person full time a week ago so if you have any issues, please email in to support@tinychat.com – Also, we need to apologize for not better informing you all of our updates. We know several of you had account issues and there was no explanation why- We cant say sorry enough, so for many of you, we have turned your accounts into lifetime accounts to say sorry.

We have some very exciting features coming out in the next week- Facebook Connect for logins, Deeper twitter integration and even a p2p system! Stay tuned!

Just a quick note.

We have updated our blog design, and moved off of wordpress to http://tinychatblog.com

If you are here, you are at the right place. Please update your feed readers.

Good morning fellow tinychatters!
Your requests for more moderation controls have not fallen on deaf ears. No, we have been hard at work like busy beavers creating a ultimate solution for non temporary chats.
Let me go over some of the new features we have enabled today:

Push to talk mode: Ever had a user come in with no headphones and ruin the entire chat with a echo? Now we ask the user if he has headphones and if he does not, we put them on push to talk mode, so their microphone is only active when they are speaking.

/broadcast command: If you enable “Control who can broadcast audio and video” you can manually make users go on and off cam, by typing /broadcast username – This means you can effectively do live shows, selecting people from the audience to go live and controlling when they are done.

/oper command: Ever wanted to make another user a room admin when you had to take off for a few hours? Now you can. Do /oper username and they will have all the powers you have!

Linking is back! We have re-enabled hyperlinking for @twitter and http:// links- No more copy and paste!

Tweet your chat: Ever wanted to have your chat messages syndicated through twitter like other services (ustream/twitcam/etc.) ? Well now you can! This feature is now bug tested and is being released for the masses

High Quality! – We have raised the quality on free and pro rooms by a significant amount! In fact, its a 4x improvement on free rooms!

Private messaging- We have added private messaging ala left clicking on a users name. There is also additional options in the menu as well.

Require Twitter mode- As a room starter, there is a new mode called “Require twitter” which will force anyone who wishes to enter your chat to signin through twitter. This means you can easily see who everyone is by checking their twitter name for their tinychat name.

We also have knocked off about 60 bugs that arent worth mentioning here, dealing with all sorts of issues from formatting, display and sound issues. Within the next few days we will be knocking out a wordpress plugin, a restyled video screen, a swear filter and custom hashtags for your own rooms.

Just a small note -

Any bans you initiate from this point forward will be IP based vs cookie based. All bans expire after 24 hours on non-pro rooms.

The good news is that this should stop all “trolling” on rooms, as they will be unable to rejoin unless they manage to change their IP.

Hey everyone-
We have been working non stop on the tons of feature requests/bugfixes that have been reported to us and we are making great progress. In the next few days we will be rolling out a “public / private” homepage which will let you browse through public tinychat rooms. You may have noticed that when you create a tinychat room lately, it asks you for a title and if its public or not. If you choose to make your chat public, it will show up in our directory (including the text chats) and users can join at will. You can still have private chats that will not be listed or stored as well.

Additionally, we just rolled out /commands which lets you have some additional options that have been requested. Just a note that we are going to also be rolling out IP bans + nickname protection which will make dealing with trolls much easier. Please find below current commands.

Tinychat commands
/color (changes the color of your chat)
/nick nickname (changes your nickname)
/me is talking about self in the third person (nuf said)
/topic this is the room topic (changes the room topic, if you are a room operator)
/msg nickname this is private (sends a private message to another user in the room)
/ignore nickname (blocks their chat messages from appearing on your screen)
/ban nickname (kicks and bans the user from the room, if you are a room operator)
/banlist (displays the ban/forgive list, if you are a room operator)

Also, We are listening to all of you that want to whitelabel/embed tinychat with more options. Please rest assured this is a key element we are focusing on and have some very exciting things in the works for you all. The amount of customization and tweaking you can do to the new embed in paralell with our awesome API is going to blow you all away.

Stay tuned….

Wow, what a launch!

We have had a ton of feedback from all of you and its not falling on deaf ears.
Right now, we are working on making the changes that you have requested, and we are currently implementing the following features:

Random colored names

Country flags

Non flash version for iphone + older browsers (chat only)

Private messages with /msg command

/me command

flashing on new msgs when browser doesn’t have focus

More intuitive members area with recordings viewer and other features

Broadcast passwords reenabled

Recording Playback widget ( ala, youtube embed )

kicking of guests that dont broadcast audio / video

New default image for embed screen thats more obvious “click here to initialize chat”

If we seem to be missing anything, or you feel that something else is broken please send us a email ( support at tinychat ) or drop us a msg in the blog comments.

Regards

Man oh man did that take a while!
We promise it was worth it. The new tinychat has video/audio/screensharing and much more. You have moderator ability now plus HD video, recording, screencasting, broadcast passwords and live shows! 12 users in a conference doing video, 100+ doing chat!

All in all good stuff, go try it out!

Hey all-

Wanted to let you know this isnt a dead project.
We are very hard at work on the next version of tinychat and didn’t want to post anything until it was done, but we are close enough to done at this point that I can spill the beans a little bit

Within the next few days we will be rolling out “v2″ of tinychat. There are many important changes and upgrades in this version and I will go over some of the cooler things below:

1. Complete backend change from using AJAX / MySQL to using XMPP ( Jabber ) / Comet
2. New design for main page / Chat pages
3. “On Focus” Support will alert you of new messages via flashing title and a sound (optional) if the tab or window doesnt have focus.
4. More intuitive private messaging system
5. Ability to join a chat with pidgin / Trillian / Any Jabber client – We also have a IRC -> Jabber Proxy in place
6. Tons of bug fixes, Scalability tweaks and other stuff you wont notice.
7. Proper Embed system allowing you to make a room to host on your site
8. Moderation system, so you can kick and ban bad users
9. Ability to ignore a user

Please note that the last screenshot is not final, and we are heavily changing the chat interface, so don’t get to accustomed to it.

We expect to launch tinychat v2 within the next few days, so stay tuned.

This is the first post on the tinychat blog, so lets make it a good one and start off with what we are going to be adding to tinychat:

Ok, here goes:

Major speed improvements, and the death of occasionaly “Freezes”

/nick command

ability to turn on / off joins and parts

add myspace and facebook as a login option – Option to not notify friends

Service icon by their username if they login via twitter/fb/etc.. + avatar

Make the dynamic, based on the last message received -Will say “X new messages” if tab doesn’t have focus.

new smileys to be used for emoticons : http://ebupof.deviantart.com/art/Pidgin-Old-Tango-Smilies-63215859

Password protected chatrooms

Encrypted chatrooms

301 www to non www

and introducing…. tinychat “extended”
Tinychat extended is designed for users who would rather opt for a non-disposable chat. It will let you register for a room name ( for instance #john ) and then you will “own” that channel. You can kick and IP ban users, add moderators, password protect it, add encryption, review all chat logs and more.

These features are primarily designed for people who want to put tinychat on their own websites via the up and coming inline flash widget. You can get the same sexy interface the main site ads, but skinnable and on your own site.

edit:
embedded chatrooms will be available in both flash and javascript versions, and there will be an option to play sounds on chat events