A while back I posted a message on FriendFeed asking if anybody hung out on any IRC channels. Not too surprisingly I got a decent amount of feedback, and many folks still were communicating using that method.
The reason I was asking is because I’m a pretty active user on FriendFeed and have made many friends on the service but the asynchronous nature of it makes me wonder when I’m posting information whether or not any of my friends are listening. And if they aren’t, perhaps my message will be buried in their feed and never seen by them.
Besides that issue, I wanted a more realtime method to talk to these new virtual friends and have a better idea of when they were online and listening as well as get to know them better. Chat interfaces are great for that. So I decided to create a simple way to roll that out to the FriendFeed community.
I’ve recently been using Mibbit.com quite a bit which offers a very clean and feature rich web interface to connect to IRC. They also offer the ability to create a customizable widget so that you can embed their interface into a web page. I had recently been using it quite a bit to chat with fellow LA Drupal users and then saw my friend Chris Charlton create Drupalchat.net.
I figured I could create that same type of site pretty easily and thus FriendFeedChat.com was born. I wanted to create a very low barrier to entry for people and like the fact that you can easily jump in through a slick interface through the site. Building this site also gave me an excuse to finally start playing with Drupal 6
The site connects to #friendfeed on irc.freenode.net so if you are a more seasoned IRC user, you can use a client. I like mIRC. I also have to mention that this site was made possible by the IRC skillz of FriendFeed user Donato (ricin) who quickly registered the channel after my initial discussion and has been helping me with the launch as well as get more proficient with IRC.
Donato has also mentioned that he was thinking about creating a bot that can feed stuff from FriendFeed and allow people to post from IRC. And we’ve also talked about creating chat logs and hosting those as well as some other features, but first we need to see if people are interested and want to use this. I don’t know if others feel the same way I do and will want yet another method to interact with FriendFeed users, but I thought I’d give it a try and look forward to hopefully chatting with them there. If you have any thoughts or ideas for the site. Let me know in the comments.
Awesome! I'm sure the community will thank you 🙂