Chatterous: chat rooms for projects and presentations
Filed Under Tools
Chatterous.com is a great service for creating chat rooms on the fly. Let’s say you’re in a group that’s working on a project together. You’d like to stay in touch as you progress through the different stages of the project, but you don’t want to have to swap IMs, emails, or cell phone numbers. You just want to be in touch for the short-term.
Chatterous groups are a great answer to this scenario. Here’s how it works:
1) Go to chatterous.com and click on the big orange button to create a new group. Fill out the name of your group, a shortname for your unique URL, a description, and specify whether you’d like the group to be public or private.
2) The next screen explains all of the ways you can add people to the group, but if you’re on a computer, the easiest way will be to send your friends the unique URL in an email. My URL is so simple, I just tell my friends, “go to chatterous dot com slash final project”.
3) When a new person arrives at the group, they’ll show up on the right hand side as a guest. Guests can immediately start typing in the chat and choose how they’d like to be notified of new comments.
They can choose to be notified via IM or Email.
4) if guests decide to be a permanent member of the group, they’ll have to create their own chatterous account. Click on the “become a member” button and fill out these fields.
Members of the group can choose to be notified via SMS (text message) when somebody in the group makes a change. This is what we use in the department when a teacher wants to find me and I’m out and about. They drop a message in our chatterous group and I get a text message on my phone telling me where help is needed.
Chatterous.com can also be used as a backchannel during presentations and lectures. Listeners can ask questions, ask for clarification, or comment on what is being said without disrupting the presenter.
