A chat window! Looks a lot like what I used to see on the gaming websites in the chat channels. Except of course this is the obligatory AJAX. Not a Java Plugin or anything. Pure JavaScript. This is the product of the new startup 3bubbles who are bringing chat to the blogosphere. For many people, unfortunately, the next question is why? Why would you want instant chat on a blog? What is wrong with the system of comments? Why do you want to keep people from different timezones seperate? Lots of hard questions. But using 3bubbles yesterday on the 3bubbles blog we were able to ask them. And get answers. I think the fact that this app was useful shows that it certainly does carry some potential even if at this stage it is not immediately clear what that potential is.

I mean blogs are popular things. This company is suggesting that placing a chat service at the bottom of posts will allow the creation of a dialogue, a two way conversation, between bloggers and readers. And I suppose they are right. Leaving comments on your own posts is not really ideal if you want to respond to comments made to your post. A chat interface might work better. But, blogs are popular, they are not however popular enough to support live chat. Most aren’t anyway. Certainly not for each post. So 3bubbles is available generally for a whole blog. Although I still doubt more than a few blogs will have enough readers to keep it going.

Much of the reaction in the blogosphere seems to be on this note. Zoli Erdos collects together some headlines, which sum up the story. People seem to just be thinking that this is one step too far. And although the technology is cool and the chat is reasonably smooth. Not quite as smooth as Gmail Chat, but it does support significantly more users at once. On Mashable, Pete Cashmore points out that a lack of permalink structure makes chat much less useful that blog comments. How is this whole thing going to be archived? Is it going to be archived? I don’t think I have heard the official word on this yet. From the conversation on the 3bubbles blog I think that the blog owner will certainly get a full transcript but whether this is published automatically to the web to become searchable is another thing.

As for making money, well the screenshot you see at the top of this post is missing the money making feature. It is going to be ad supported, and they will somehow (in a currently undecided way) be built into the interface. Overally I reckon that 3bubbles does have a future. On the busiest blogs it will prove useful for quick discussions especially when discussing some new hype. But in general I think comments still rule the feedback on blogs zone. And especially with the possibility of this tool… Review Soon.