'Net Features : chat

More Than Chatting, LivePerson Comes to SAP's hybris

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:30:00 GMT

Commerce platform hybris, which was recently acquired by SAP, announced that customer service and engagement platform LivePerson (which provides businesses with a system to pro-actively connect in real time with customers via chat, voice and content delivery) has been added to the Hybris Extend marketplace.

"Building and maintaining a compelling and efficient customer experience requires retailers to be able to respond quickly to customers’ evolving expectations,” explained Patrick Finn, Vice President of Channels, Americas at hybris. “The marriage of these two leading platforms further strengthens hybris’ OmniCommerce strategy of speeding time to innovation by providing merchants with a solution that can be installed faster, configured more efficiently and enhanced continuously to meet the needs of customers and the retailer’s business model.”

The integration with hybris puts LivePerson into some pretty excellent company. hybris Extend parterns and solutions currently include such names as Adobe, SeeWhy, Bazaarvoice, Autonomy, Avalara and others.

Related Posts from Website Magazine:
- Personalizing Advertising with Real-time Creative
- 50 Top Solutions for the E-Commerce Customer Experience
- Petco Explores Customer Sentiment with LP Insights
- Lift Conversion Rates with Keyword Intelligence Tool

Facebook API Activity

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:20:00 GMT

The past four weeks have been an active one for Web and mobile app developers - particuarly for those in any way using Facebook's API's.

Facebook has updated four of its API's in the last month: the Social Graph API and the Real-time Updates API were updated December 20th, and the Facebook Chat API and the Social Plugins were updated in the past week.

While changes to the API's themselves were routine and actually quite minor, 500 million users worldwide (some say closer to 600 million) demand attention.

Let's take a closer looks at those API's recently updated:

Graph API: Perhaps the most important API from Facebook, the Graph API gives developers the opportunity to view connections within a particular social graph. Thanks to every object in the social graph having a unique ID, developers can display Facebook wall content, pages and even apps within their own websites and applications (with minimal resources). A good example of the possibilities is the FB.WALL jQuery plugin featured at WM in early January.

Real-time Updates API: The Facebook Real-Time Updates API allows developers to create applications that respond to real-time data updates from Facebook subscriptions. Objects that can be subscribed to are: user, permissions, page. Uses REST protocol and JSON data format.

Facebook Chat API: This API allows users to integrate Facebook Chat into their Web-based, desktop, or mobile instant messaging products. The user's instant messaging client connects to Facebook Chat via the Jabber/XMPP service. Uses XMPP protocols and responses are formatted as XML or vCard.

Facebook Social Plugins API: The most basic (rendered through Javascript) but definitely most visible (who among us has not seen 'Like This on Facebook' before), Facebook Social Plugins make a user's friend's social activity available via API. Through the API, developer's apps can provide users with access about what their friends have liked, commented on or shared on sites across the web.

Zoho Chat with Everyone

MaureenA — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Zoho, a company known for its collection of online products for small- and medium-sized businesses launched its Chat 2.0 Multi-Channel version. This new version allows users to log into multiple instant messenger platforms at the same time, allowing for conversations with colleagues and friends who use different IM products including Yahoo!, Google, MSN and AIM. Chat 2.0 is integrated into other Zoho products to streamline business practices and conversation. Website Magazine has covered Zoho product launches and applications in previous posts.

Other additions to Chat 2.0 include Zoho Meeting, which allows users to share desktops with other users; Zoho Calendar to allow users to organize events and meetings; and Groups to allow users to organize contacts. The company offers 19 products ranging from e-mail, word processing to invoicing and CRM - some free and others paid, depending on the size of the business.

__________

Looking for practical advice on how to succeed in Web business?
Request a professional-level membership from Website Magazine and receive bright ideas each month to shorten your road to profitability.

99Chats Chat Room Widget

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:27:00 GMT

I have some reservations about using third-party widgets when there are so many exceptional, so many more robust commercial solutions available on the market, but if you're just getting started on the Web and are looking to add chat room functionality, the 99Widgets Group has launched 99Chats.com, a free flash chat room widget that might be of interest.

99Chats.com is fully customizable (colors, background and fonts to border style, size and design and even the opacity level), but webmasters and weblog owners can also create their own themes or choose one of the ready-to-use themes available.

What is unique about the solution, and what will be interesting, is that 99Chats.com allows users to extend interaction with visitors with realtime text messaging on almost any web resource as it uses pure flash code.

99Chats.com is lightweight and takes only 65KB. It also supports tabbed private messaging with chat members, block user, and flood detection and prevention mechanism, and it works in any language. 99Widgets actually has quite a few widgets available, including those for polls, counters and others.