About YouTalk
Enter. Chat. Leave. YouTalk is as simple as Internet chat gets. Find a chatroom to join and talk your fingers off. We are not a social networking site. You don't need to spend hours finessing your profile before you start interacting with others.
It's about you. YouTalk has no moderator or admin. If you can't find a chatroom that interests you, go ahead and create your own and wait for others to join you there. Our users solely determine what goes on in our community. Popular chatrooms will always be buzzing with activity as users come and go, while the dull ones will quickly fade into obscurity.
Cool Features
- Works whether or not you have a Google Account. Signed in users get a few extra features. :-)
- Browse the most popular or most recently created chatrooms, or search chatrooms by keyword.
- Chat in as many rooms concurrently as you want. Your nick/status/photo/color are automatically synched across all rooms.
- Click on a user's name to request to chat with the user in private.
- URLs in chat messages are automatically hyperlinked.
- Embed an image or YouTube video in your conversation by pasting an image or YouTube URL into your chat message.
- Quickly search YouTube for your favorite videos by typing "youtube:<search term>" as your chat message. Great for looking up music videos and playing the videos as background music for your chat session.
- Express yourself by prefixing your chat messages with "shout:" or "action:".
- Tested on IE 6, Safari 3 (Windows), and Firefox 2.
- If you are a website owner, learn how to embed your own YouTalk chatroom in your webpages here.
Technical Notes
- Adaptive polling to reduce server load. The polling interval increases as activity in the chatroom slows.
- Chatroom messages are guaranteed to appear in the same order for all users. This means that because of network latency issues, some messages may suddenly appear in between messages that have already been displayed on the screen.
- No data writes when polling.
- Idle users in a room are automatically removed after a certain time. Great for removing users that suddenly lose their network connection but still appear to be in the room.
- Uses all of App Engine's major features:
- Datastore API
- Users API
- URL Fetch API - For calling YouTube's search API.
- Mail API - For sending "Tell your friend about YouTalk" emails from the app.
- Django templates
- Simple caching for the list of most popular and most recent rooms. Which are just about the only things that are cacheable.
- Third-party open source code used: SimpleJSON, jQuery.
Release Notes
- Apr 8, 2008 - First release.
- Apr 30, 2008 - Greatly improved responsiveness of chat message entry. Migrated parts of JS code to jQuery.
Feedback
Send us fan/hate mail at youtalk.support@gmail.com.