Introducing Chatterbloc, My New jQuery Project…

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Some background… Chatterbloc is based on an idea my friend Jon had a few months back for an easy to use collaboration tool we called the cooler. Jon and I spoke about it for a while, throwing ideas around, eventually hitting on some decisions and getting to work. We started back in November 2008, with our first complete closed beta hitting the web around December 27th. Since that time we’ve been working on tweaks and issues, as well as having to take some time out for our full time jobs (Jon jet-setting to San Francisco, me starting at Sony Computers).

Our main objectives with Chatterbloc are

Create the easiest way to start a chat
Give easy to use options to share that chat experience with friends
Interact in new and exciting ways

Chatterbloc isn’t just a chat application. Whilst we have aimed to make the chat as great as it can be, we’ve still got lots of ideas on where to go with that. However, our killer feature isn’t the chat, it’s the interactive web sharing that’s built in. Share web sites with your friends, watch youTube videos together, search the web all at the same time, or try and find a restaurant for you all to go to with the maps functionality. It’s a whole new chat experience, and it’s time to share it with you.

Chatterbloc isn’t perfect yet, it’s still a beta, and we’d love to have your feedback. We plan to iterate often (2/3 times a day) in these early few weeks. We’ve got further Twitter integration coming (some of it’s already in there), as well as more crazy collaboration tools for you all to enjoy. The Changelog is available for you all to see, and I’ll hopefully blog about significant changes as often as possible.

Regular readers will also be interested to know that we’re using jQuery quite liberally through Chatterbloc. I’m in the midst of re-writing a lot of the code (I was learning as I went along at the time). Alot of ajax stuff, as well as animating menus and enhancing form usability on the various modal menus that we have. I’ve also recently dropped in Twitter integration which is using similar code to my jQuery / PHP / Twitter articles earlier this month.

I hope you enjoy Chatterbloc. Our development blog is here if you’re interested in giving us feedback, otherwise comments welcome here.