BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Last couple of days one of our clients and I spend quite some time researching providers of online chat service. This is one of those services where a visitor of your web site can click on the image with a smiling lady and supposedly chat with a friendly (or not so friendly) sales person.

The advantages of this sales tool and live help tool are numerous - you can see how visitors move from one page to another in real time, you can engage them in chat when they reach certain part of your web site or even walk them through your site! Various services allow popping up an invitation window after certain period of time, based upon certain rules or pages visited. We looked through several live help services and I have decided to share some of the research on live help service with readers of this blog.

BoldChat - overall we got a good impression of this live chat service. The setup consists of putting special code on your web site and downloading a Windows-platform software (they don’t have Mac version, as far as I know) to keep track of visitors, engage in live chat sessions and so on. The drawbacks are confusing list of features and a little higher price then most competitors - $29.95 per operator per month, $79.95 per 3 operators per month (there is a discount that adds to pricing confusion).

Live2Support - very confusing pricing model. Chat services are divided into Bronze, Silver and Gold plans with different number of operators available for each “denomination”. Cons: basic (bronze) lacks most of the basic features, poor sales representatives level. Pros: rich features on the pricier plans, ability to use both web interface and Windows-based software to keep track of users and chats, advanced chat functions - chat sharing, transfer, moderation. Pricing: from $9.99 Bronze plan with single operator to $69 for Gold plan with 10 operators.

LivePerson - one of the most expensive providers of live web site chat services. I was unable to find any mention of the pricing online, but through a chat session with a live operator I was quoted pricing from $99 and up per month per operator. The sales agent was very pushy, offering some discounts on a “take it or leave it” basis. They, however, are very popular service, powering many large-scale web sites.

(Continued - Part 2 of Live Chat Review series)

Popularity: 13%

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Flock - the social web browser built on top of the Firefox - has a built-in blog editor. When I first launched it I was hoping to have some sort of Notepad for quick and easy blogging. Something that would look like Performancing plug-in for Firefox.

Unfortunately blog editor from Flock falls short of any other editor, even the one in WordPress itself. Editor window is very basic. Although Flock’s Accounts and Services tab allows you to have more then one blog configured, you have no idea what blog your post is coming to. XML-RPC API that WordPress uses is called MovableType. Maybe they are the same, but for non-technical people this is more then confusing.

Ability to choose from half a dozen fonts and regular named sizes doesn’t quite cut it to be a quickie notepad for any blogger. I can hardly imagine anyone using this crippled tool. Unfortunately, as with the whole concept of Flock, a thing that tries to be too many things for too many people ends up being nothing for all people. Here’s my prediction for next year - Flock will flop.

Technorati Tags: blog editor,blog,editor

Popularity: 22%

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Next in our blog editor review is Windows Live Writer. Not sure what’s the version I am still downloading five minutes after launching a setup, but I hope it’s the latest one.

(5 minutes later) It’s the version 1366, which have to be updated to version 1367 via Microsoft Update. Downloading patch separately isn’t possible. You have to watch out for these things, you know!

The installation of this blog editor software wasn’t even close to the simplicity of previous packages. First - you have to download the installer. Then installer searches for Windows Live Writer installations on your computer and then downloads and installs updated core version. Then you have to go through Windows Update to …emm… update Writer to the latest version. Obviously, Microsoft doesn’t look for simple ways of doing things.

During the install process I noticed that Microsoft, being an innovator everywhere, uses the term ‘weblog’ instead of more common ‘blog’. Guess it makes some sense to people at MS, but it totally escapes me. While installing the Writer itself, the installer offered to poison my laptop with Messenger, Mail, Toolbar, Photo Gallery and Family Safety modules. I politely declined. Upon finishing the installation, the setup program decided that now it has powers over my machine and opened Windows Live homepage without even asking. But I expected that anyway.

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Popularity: 40%

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• Qumana Blog Editor (January 16, 2008): For the second round of blog editor software reviews I decided to go with Qumana Blog editor. Available at Qumana.com, this free software is available for both Windows and Mac OS platforms. Current version as of writing this post is 3.0.1. The software is written in Java. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but [...]
• Flock Built-In Blog Editor (January 18, 2008): Flock - the social web browser built on top of the Firefox - has a built-in blog editor. When I first launched it I was hoping to have some sort of Notepad for quick and easy blogging. Something that would look like Performancing plug-in for Firefox. Unfortunately blog editor from Flock falls short of any other [...]
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