Also, an interesting story: While practicing our pitches we setup a Chatterous group for our fellow YC founders to provide real-time feedback for our presentations. It actually got to a point where people weren't paying attention to the presentations anymore and became immersed in Chatterous! We feel that Chatterous is super easy to use because of the fact that you don't need to navigate to our website, even as a Chatterous user - it's one of your IM buddies on gtalk, or an e-mail address, or an SMS short code. Think of it as IRC meets Twitter for the Hacker News community :)

And I don't mean that in a negative sense. Your enthusiasm shows through the medium.

- easily create account

- has unique url's (important if you want to cut+paste, send to others)

- email authorisation in reasonable time

- basic customisation (as expected) though no memorable default icon (think twitter, flickr)

- each post has unique url (good so I can refer to them in the future).

- not sure of post size limit (twit is 140 characters) what is chatterous?

- entry box needs a few visual feedback indicators (not important just yet) what will be clipped when sent to sms?

- links in comments are not rendered as links but text (how are long urls handled? tinyurl like twitter is bad - I don't know the solution?)

Only the creation side which always leads to the next bit convincing your friends that they need to get on board. From flickr to twitter, twitter to friendfeed this has been the bane of my life on any "social-service". I don't have any real suggestions [0] other than an observation on icons. Most of my twitter friends who I know from flickr use recognisable icons. So when I saw the icons on friendfeed I could sign them on immediately.

[0] All companies are suffering because of this. No company wants to give away their users friends list. Though the first company that allows easy access to friends will be my customer for life. When is this problem going to be solved?

Chatterous is just social glue - they don't even bind you to the site.

I missed that bit. How?

"... Your friends don't need to sign up Your friends don't need to sign up to chat with you! They can reply right on their im, email or phone. ..." ~ http://www.chatterous.com/faq/

Ah so users to contact a group "foo" would google mail, email "[email protected]", or "text CHTR foo <msg> to 41411" then?

How do they get the message? Do they still have to sign up to see it?

Ok, that solves the signup problem.

So you still need to get the contact details. Not as hard as getting friends to sign up. What is the advantage of non group creators (non-admins) signing up then?

Why can't GTalk addresses be anything but gmail/googlemail? I have accounts that are created using Google Apps and would prefer to use those rather than gmail addys.

Thanks, looks pretty neat so far.

If you're connecting to talk.google.com to send the messages, you should be able to send to any logged-in user address. This feature is really important for our teams to use this tool.

So far it's very cool, though. Keep up the good work!

Are there not privacy laws that come into play here? Not saying Chatterous are up to no good - really, it looks like a terrific service - but you see what I mean.

I don't think it's Chatterous's problem, as long as they provide a confirmation email and opt-out procedure.

It allows people to remain hyper connected.