Wayne Schulz

Adding a chat box to your web site that does not require a visitor to log in or already have an instant messaging account can be expensive. There are services like Live Support that offer this service but the cost of $24.95 per month is more expensive than what I’ve wanted to pay.  Google offers a Google Talk Chatback badget – but that doesn’t work with mobile clients such as BeeJive on the iPhone. Here’s a solution that has been out for a few years that I just noticed.  AOL offers a free widget called wimzi that you can embed to your web site for no cost. It allows unregistered web visitors to chat with you and it works with either your desktop or mobile AIM chat client.

The wimzi widget is available free from this page.

You must have a free AOL instant messaging account in order to chat with web visitors.  Your visitors however do not have to register or do anything other than type in order to chat live with you.

Most other services either require your visitor to register or they charge a monthly fee for you to place a chat box on your site.

You can even create multiple chat boxes and manage them all from this site (useful if you have several different web properties that  you manage).

There have been other services, most notably Google Talk Chatback, which allow you to create free web based chat boxes.

The problem that I found with Google’s Chatback is that it would not connect to any of my Google Talk accounts on my iPhone since it always presented an authorization box prior to initiating the chat. For some reason the iPhone (and presumably other mobile chat clients) would not authenticate and allow me to start chatting with someone who visited my site via the web.

Not so with AIM wimzi.

As you can see from this image taken from BeeJive on my iPhone – I’m able to be instantly alerted as well as reply to visitors to my web site. Remember that these visitors have not had to register or be AIM members in order to ask me a question.

In testing I found the service to be acceptable for light use.

Some of the HTML coding of the chat box is a little off – for example my company name is positioned over the AIM logo. However for a free service this is something that is worth checking out to see if a web based chat will be useful. If you find yourself servicing clients from your web site on a regular basis then you can always move up to the presumably more reliable paid web chat clients.

wimzi

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About Wayne Schulz

Wayne Schulz is a CT CPA and consultant. In his spare time he enjoys hiking, New York City, blogging, technology and searching for the perfect smartphone. He lives in Glastonbury CT with his two children. Contact Wayne by email at wayne@wayneschulz.com. (Important: We are not the manufacturer or seller of any items we've blogged so unfortunately we are unable to provide support or answer questions about them).