TechCrunch: Facebook Groups can now launch up to 250-person chat rooms. “If you miss the old AOL chat rooms, you’ll love Facebook’s plan to combine Groups and Messenger without spamming you to death. Starting today, Facebook will gradually roll out the ability for members of Facebook Groups to launch group chats about specific sub-topics that up to 250 members can join.”
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Engadget: Yahoo Together group chat app organizes conversations by topic
Engadget: Yahoo Together group chat app organizes conversations by topic . “You have loads of group chat apps to choose from if you want to keep in touch with friends and family, but Yahoo’s new entry promises a more organized experience than most. The company has launched a new app for Android and iOS called Yahoo Together, which can split up conversations into topics.”
How-To Geek: How to Create, Set Up, and Manage Your Discord Server
How-To Geek: How to Create, Set Up, and Manage Your Discord Server. “Discord is a quickly growing text and voice chat application, aimed at gamers in particular. Its sleek and simple design makes it an excellent alternative to older apps like Teamspeak and Skype. Discord has taken a lot of inspiration from Teamspeak’s extensive customization and management options but has buried some of those options within the interface. Luckily, it’s pretty simple to get started.”
Lifehacker: Where to Find the Best Reddit Chat Rooms
Lifehacker: Where to Find the Best Reddit Chat Rooms. “Reddit chat rooms are here. As if you didn’t spend enough of your 9-to-5 workday browsing /r/aww, /r/explainlikeimfive, /r/bestof, or /r/SubredditDrama, you can now share your thoughts about posts (and life) with real Redditors in real time! Mashing the F5 key to refresh a static comments page is so last year.”
Digital Trends: Relive 1998 as live chat rooms roll out across Reddit in a limited beta
Digital Trends: Relive 1998 as live chat rooms roll out across Reddit in a limited beta. “Reddit is slowly rolling out real-time chat rooms across a limited number of subreddits. Currently in beta, Reddit Chat went live in the summer of 2017 for about 7,000 Reddit users. Now, Reddit is expanding this service, keeping users locked to the website instead of conducting real-time chats on external clients like Slack, Discord, and even IRC.”
The Next Web: The $24 billion chatbot industry sucks because it needs better AI
The Next Web: The $24 billion chatbot industry sucks because it needs better AI. “In 2014, WIRED would profile a ‘boring’ company called Slack beginning a media and venture-based obsession with bringing chat to every corner of our work lives. Somewhere along the way, the growth of chat-based enterprise communication was conflated with a preference for doing everything in a chat window, and thus we were given chatbots. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella would go on to call them ‘the new interface,’ and by 2017 over $24 billion in funding had gone into chatbot companies. A year later, and the landscape of chatbot funding is desolate. And it’s because they were never truly built to solve the many, many problems they were supposedly created to fix.”
CNET: Instagram’s new 4-way group video chat lets you browse, too
CNET: Instagram’s new 4-way group video chat lets you browse, too. “Instagram could be worth more than $100 billion, and has one billion users a month. So it’s not surprising that the company would roll out its own group video chat service separate from its owner Facebook.”
