HumanClick.

April 21, 2001 12:04 PM

HumanClick. This is cool. This allows you to post a little 'chat link' on your site. You can chat online with your visitors that visit your site. I added it to one of my sites and people just drop by and say hello. They don't need to install anything on the client side. Interactivity always seems to benefit sites.
posted by borgle (9 comments total)

I found this thing about two months ago and it is both "whack" and "far out". The best part is that you can "request chats" with the users, which slides a creepy box across their browser window saying "THE WEBMASTER WANTS TO CHAT WITH YOU. CLICK HERE" allowing you to unleash unbelievable verbal terror on your visitors.

The downside is that all of the conversations I managed to have pretty much went like:

Me: "Muahahahah! I have hacked your Internet Explorer!! Kneel before me!"
Them: "WTF??!?!?!"
Me: "Are you having a good time on my site?"
Them: "R U REAL??! WTF???"

And so on until I got bored, which was usually about ten minutes (per person).
posted by frenetic at 1:38 PM on April 21, 2001

i used to have this on my site, but usually people just came on to ask me to show my titties on the webcam. so i disabled it.
posted by sugarfish at 2:15 PM on April 21, 2001

Wow, this reminds me of the good old days of dial-up BBSs. There was always an option to page the sysop (a word you dont see much anymore either) or he/she would jump in and chat with you in the middle of a tradewars game.
posted by skallas at 3:12 PM on April 21, 2001

I tried this thing out about a year and a half ago, and since then they've updated the software a little bit and gotten bought out by LivePerson.

They want to transition both of these services to be business-focused, and the LP reps I talked to during the buyout actually said things to the effect of "Human Click is amateurish and makes you look like you've got a GeoCities page". So I'm guessing support for that product isn't their highest priority.

The webmaster software isn't that bad, it sits unobtrusively in the tray and lets you know when a visitor's requesting help. On the client side, it was (as of a few months ago) prone to being flaky with all the usual JavaScript caveats.

Overall, I think the mailto: links served me a lot better than HumanClick ever did... add in some instant messenging links, and you've got most of the bases covered.
posted by anildash at 3:25 PM on April 21, 2001

can you talk to more than one person at once - basically form a chat channel with your site?

The advantage I see with this is that no one has to install anything or even use an external program (as long as their browser cooperates). Any IM program or IRC is going to be better, but loses some of that immediacy.

If not this, is there any other software along the same lines?
posted by mutagen at 7:24 PM on April 21, 2001

Oy vey, dial-up BBSes... I actually stopped calling my favourite BBS because the sysop would constantly break in to chat with me all the time while I was trying to tread through the hundreds of messages I'd missed since I last tried to call and got interrupted by a chathappy sysop. This sounds just as irritating, though I can understand the pluses for customer service and such... kind of.
posted by evixir at 9:20 PM on April 21, 2001

I *was* that sysop.. actually the best was the chat request, users could type in a reason and this super loud DOS alarm would go off and wake me up.. I only got into that dial-up scene at the very end, but it was a beautiful thing.. I don't see any real big difference between a link to ICQ or AIM on a page and this.. Except that bored webmasters can bother me now..
posted by mikeyb at 12:58 AM on April 22, 2001

I have a chat mechanism on my site already. The best part about it is that it doesn't interrupt me when someone wants to chat and I don't interrupt them. It's time-delayed to when we both want or can respond. It's called email.
posted by dithered at 12:23 PM on April 22, 2001

I've used this once (on the client side) when I had a question for a merchant about an item. It was cool for that, since I was already on the phone with a business call and the customer service rep could see exactly what I was talking about.
posted by sixdifferentways at 8:40 PM on April 22, 2001