Category: news

Live Streaming & Group Chat

Live streaming has become robustly more popular in 2016 and it’s expected that the ways it will used will boom. RumbleTalk has already seen customers using group chat in tangent to live streaming services and for this reason we’ll be taking a closer look at the advantages of doing so.

Live Streaming Today

In the last couple of years alone, companies like Facebook and YouTube have released free tools to live stream directly from your computer or phone. There’s no need to buy expensive software or equipment and this low cost barrier makes it accessible to just about everyone.

There are several companies that offer free live streaming now. Facebook Live and YouTube Live  are among the top providers and there’s also Twitter’s Periscope. For more professional (and paid) services, companies like Livestream, DaCast, and Ustream offer end to end features.

Without having properly tested the gambit of options out there, we’re not going to recommend one service over the other, but we would love to hear from our customers what they prefer. So if you do use a live streaming service for your organization or company, let us know!

Including Chat with Live Streaming

With the raw and connected feeling live streaming provides, it’s recommended to include your viewers in the experience by giving them an avenue to comment and participate.

Some live streaming platforms do offer chat services alongside their video stream, however these are oftentimes extremely limited. This is where RumbleTalk group chat becomes the best alternative.

RumbleTalk is a premium group chat services that offers a full range of bells and whistles not offered in basic chat services. Here’s a few examples:

  • Custom login options
    RumbleTalk gives chat owners the option to choose one, some, or all available login options; choose from anonymous, guest, Facebook, Twitter, and password protected users.
  • Live messages
    Most messaging applications used within a live streaming service are forum style. RumbleTalk group chats are live and instant to match the pace of the live stream. Some services limit the number of characters each comment can contain, for example: RumbleTalk allows 10 times more characters than YouTube and has no limit on how many messages can be sent in a certain time frame.
  • File/Image/Video sharing
    In some cases, you’ll want your audience to be able to share more than just characters. With RumbleTalk, users can upload files, share images, and even embed videos. But this is just the beginning. A RumbleTalk group chat has features for just about every type of communication.
  • You control when the conversation begins and ends
    RumbleTalk group chats are turned on and off by you, the administrator, whereas some services only offer the option to chat during the live stream, RumbleTalk group chats can start before and go on after the live stream has ended.
  • Archiving and further use
    A RumbleTalk transcript can be archived and exported for further use. We have customers who use the HTML transcript after the fact to increase their SEO/SERP results with this keyword rich content.

When is RumbleTalk Right for You?

A majority of live streaming scenarios don’t require all the perks of RumbleTalk group chat. So when is it right for you?

We’ve found two conditions that make RumbleTalk a good choice for live streaming.

First, your live stream must be active on your website. If you are only broadcasting on YouTube or Facebook or any other live streaming service, then you’ll have to stick with their commenting service.

However, if you embed the live stream on your website (click here for instructions on this for Facebook and YouTube) then you can also embed your RumbleTalk group chat alongside it. You’ll be able to customize the group chat (with our admin panel or CSS) to match the look and feel of your website.

If you’re considering whether it’s worth it to embed the video and chat, consider the impact you’ll have on your sales or call to action when you keep your customers on your website rather than sending them away. Plus, we’ve made it simple to customize and embed.

And second, your viewer’s participation must be important. Bluntly put, if you don’t care about your viewers comments or if your viewers don’t care about the larger community participating in the live stream, then RumbleTalk may not be right for you.

However, if you are using a live stream to connect viewers in a more tangible way, you’ll want to give them the best platform to fully express themselves. That’s where RumbleTalk comes in.

By giving your viewers a live group chat with all the perks listed above, you’ll enable a dynamic discourse to take your live stream to the next step. You’ll get more engagement and out of your viewers and your viewers will get more value from your live stream.

—

For more information, pricing, product features and demos  visit the RumbleTalk  website or contact support(at)rumbletalk(dot)com.

Posted on by Editor

Today We Are Celebrating 500,000 Group Chat Installations!

 

But numbers aren’t everything – we have a lot to be proud of.

We’ve increased the speed of our loading time and messages by using caching technology and loading components from a global content delivery network (CDN).

There are a million different ways to communicate on the web and each one is fit for its unique purpose. RumbleTalk offers consumers an extremely efficient and instantaneous way to communicate with groups big and small.

With this in mind, we’ve designed our back end with a time saving infrastructure.

RumbleTalk group chats cache information so that the data you’ve already seen will load without delay.

We also store copies of our information all over the world so that wherever your group participants are, the information will be sent from the closest server. This sheds off milliseconds and, in some cases, full seconds the first time someone opens a chat.

Our fall back architecture is so good that in the event that any connection is lost for a short period of time, you won’t even notice it.

Failures can happen on the user’s end or on the provider’s end. In either case, RumbleTalk has built in fail-safe measures to keep the conversation going.

When your users have a server failure, RumbleTalk group chat seamlessly queues messages so that when the problem is fixed, the user is back in the chat without having left it.

And if the failure happens on our end, we have a network of back up servers that instantly take over to ensure the conversation goes on without interruption.

RumbleTalk has further optimized its mobile web app. Faster loading times, adjustable fonts, and full screen chat rooms are just a few of the pieces we’ve added to our software.

Mobile browsing is here to stay. If you want your community to engage from their phone, you have to have a mobile optimized chat.

Whether or not your website is optimized for mobile users, your RumbleTalk group chat will be. When a user enters your group chat room, they’ll enjoy our modern and efficient web application fit for and adaptable to tablets and smartphones.

We’ve improved the default settings and functions so that font size can be adjusted by the user, the chat can be expanded to full screen, as always speed is priority. We also offer the ability for you to customize using the mobile version separately from the web version using CSS. This way you can simplify your design to further enhance the user experience.

We’ve added a login SDK so that your users can use their identity on your website to log into your group chat room.

A recent addition to our features is the ability to use your existing user data base for your group chat. Once a user logs into your website, they’ll have their information auto-populate their profile in the group chat and they won’t have to log in a second time to participate.

We’ve also expanded our software to provide enterprise solutions.

We are now capable of white-label integration for other software platforms to be able to offer their customers group chat services. Companies who partner with us can either add this as part of their package, or partner for revenue sharing. In either case, the company’s customers have access to all the features of a RumbleTalk group chat.

RumbleTalk also has a new REST API that allows a company to control and manage their chats in every way directly from their system. This is best utilized by organizations and companies that want to manage a large number of group chat rooms.

THANK YOU!

We know that none of this would have been possible if it wasn’t for our existing customer. So THANK YOU! You’ve supported us and cheered us on through our first 500,000 group chat installations. Our promise is to continue to improve and to be the very best group chat software on the market.

Thank You!
-The RumbleTalk Team

Posted on by Editor

Better Communication, Better Profiles, Better Design

RumbleTalk rolled out three new updates for our beta users over the weekend that touch on different aspects of the group chat experience.

  • Better Communication: Chat administrators can privately contact users even when private messages are disabled.
  • Better Profiles: User profiles can now include a description.
  • Better Design: The profile and private communication menu design has been improved.

If you’d like to be one of our beta users, just let us know!

More details below:

Better Communication

Previously, private communication could be entirely enabled or disabled but there were no exceptions. Either way, the setting applied to everyone in the group chat room.

Our customers asked for the ability to disable private communications among all users and still allow chat administrators to have the ability to initiate a private conversation with a user.

Now this is possible!

group chat and private chat

From the chat setting menu, under general, select BOTH private chat and administrator only. With this configuration, chat administrators can click on the user they want to speak privately to and send a message or make an audio or video call, but users will not.

private moderator conversations

We’ll have a support page to explain this in detail soon.

Better Profiles

We’ve always had the ability to write a notes or a description of a user in the Managed Users tab of the settings panel.

With our latest update, these descriptions will appear for everyone to see within the group chat room.

To see a user’s description from within the group chat, click on the user profile and then the settings icon.

group chat user descriptions

Better Design

While we were working on the previous two updates, we also improved certain aspects of the user profile and private communication dialog box.

Take a look!

private chat design update

We prioritize our features based on customer feedback. Let us know what you want to see next!

Posted on by Editor