Photo by aslakr licensed under a Creative Commons license

So here’s the really big news from the show, at the end of the month the mighty Yahoo! will be flying me out to San Francisco to show Chatsum in their 2006 Design Expo. I’ll be at the Sunnyvale campus from 29th July to 1st August and then in downtown San Francisco until the 6th.

If anyone wants to meet up between the 2nd and 6th or knows someone or something they think I should see just drop me a line at:

george [ at ] chatsum.com

Already on the list are Wendy burgers, the Golden Gate Bridge, The Sausage Factory, Purple Skunk Skate Shop and the trams! What am I missing?

Now that the thank yous are out of the way, I thought you might like to know how the show went. In a word: brilliantly!

There were over 1,000 visitors per day with VIPs including Prince Philip, Gordon Brown, Terence Conran, the Duke of Gloucester and the venerable Tom Coates.

I got to meet both Prince Philip and Gordon Brown and show them Chatsum. Prince Philip thought our font sizes were too small but admitted he has that problem with the whole of the Internet; Gordon Brown left saying he’d remember the name ‘Chat-sum’, only after he’d probed me on its economic value.

Next came the news that Microsoft are interested in talking to us, firming up a rumour we’d heard from our Brazilian users - they’re so ahead of the game. Now all we need is for that Google rumour of theirs to come true too!

I also had some really good conversations with people from the BBC, Design Council, Skype, The Guardian, BSkyB and Cambridge University all of whom I’ll be getting back in touch with as soon as I get a chance.

I’ve left out the really big news because it deserves its own post and I need to find a nice picture to go with it but stay tuned, it’s not often I have news bigger than meeting the Queen’s husband.

I just want to send out a very big thank you to everyone that uttered even the smallest bit of chat during the RCA show - I passed and can now write MA (RCA) after my name!

Extra big thank yous go out to Lee, for providing the longest stints of guaranteed chat - clocking in at around 14 hours a day for most of the show, and to PolarBear and NightHawk for their fantastic Chatsum Wikipedia article that got me some serious points during my final presentation.

I’d also like to thank SeanEtCetera for his undying enthusiasm running up to and through the show as well as pushing out the borders of Chatsumland with his secret Chatsum Dictionary page.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!

If you’re wondering where I’ve been these last few days take a look at the photo above. We’re exhibiting Chatsum in this year’s Royal College of Art Summer Show so I’ve spent the last week painting, sanding, painting again, lugging equipment, mounting banners and testing software.

As the photo above was taken with a camera phone and you can’t really make out what’s on the screens here’s the low down. The smaller angled screen is running Firefox and Chatsum as a kiosk so visitors to the show can give it a go and meet our users. Then the big screens from left to right show: A live display of all chat, from all rooms scrolling up the screen with large avatars and urls of where to find the people chatting. Then, a world map that does realtime IP to geographic location mapping to show where Chatsum users are connecting from and where the servers they are looking at are based. Finally the last screen shows the profiles of everyone currently online so visitors can pick out specific users to talk to from their profile data. We’ll also be giving away postcards with details of how to join Chatsum and I’ll be on hand to answer any questions visitors may have.

If you’re going to be in London between the 23rd June and 2nd July please drop in to the show, opening times are here.

If you can’t make it to the physical space, we’ll also be inviting all Chatsum users to an online version of the Private View with this e-mail going out some time this week:

Tell your family, tell your friends, Chatsum has gone open beta and now absolutely anybody can join in for free.

We’ve had a great response from our closed beta testers who’ve been nagging us to open it up for everyone so that’s exactly what we’ve done. Please bear in mind this is still a beta and currently only available for Firefox. Bandwidth charges permitting we’re now getting to work on adding more features and support for more browsers.

Visit this page, fill out the form, get using Chatsum and let us know what you think.

Help us spread the word, Digg Us!
http://digg.com/technology/Chatsum_released_

Today we’re releasing some hot new Chatsum features, and for the first time, they’re not just for beta testers! We have just rolled out our Chatsum user profile pages which can be viewed by anyone. Check out mine:

http://www.chatsum.com/members/George

Every Chatsum user now has the ability to publish their browsing history, weekly and overall top sites, not just has a profile page but as RSS too! We’re also encouraging users to plug-in their feeds from other services like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, Upcoming, etc. so you can see all of these feeds in one place. Check out Lee’s profile:

http://www.chatsum.com/members/Lee

You can keep an eye on who’s been online and edited their profile or search through the current member list here:

http://www.chatsum.com/members/list/active

In order to test these new features fully we’ve also invited in the 1500 users who were waiting for the next round of beta testing. If all goes well and there are no major bugs found, we hope to open Chatsum up to anyone in about a week.

Please let us know if you find any bugs here: Known bugs

Pictured left is another way of viewing the Chatsum dataset that we’ve been playing with here in the lab (Click the image for the fullsize version over at Flickr.com). Each favicon represents a unique web address added to the database of visited urls. The timeline reads left to right, top to bottom.

Obviously this is only a small subset of the data but it’s great to start interrogating it from a visual, rather than textual, perspective. Once we’ve made it a bit more user (and server) friendly we’ll let you have a go!

P.S. For everyone wondering what the Chatsum 0.6 update brought - I’m afraid it was only Firefox 2.0 compatibility for all the early adopters. We have, however, made serious progress with the new features we’re planning to roll out soon so keep your eyes peeled for more updates from us in the coming weeks.

As we inch closer to the Chatsum Public Beta we’ve been trawling through vast amounts of data trying to get a better understanding of our users. We’ve been looking at the data, both live and archived, from lots of different angles but sometimes the simplest analyses are the best, so here for you today is the Chatsum Users’ Top 20 most visited websites:

The Chatsum Top 20

1. www.chatsum.com
2. www.google.com
3. www.google.co.uk
4. mail.google.com
5. news.bbc.co.uk
6. digg.com
7. del.icio.us
8. www.eurogamer.net
9. www.google.com.co
10. www.bloglines.com
11. www.last.fm
12. www.flickr.com
13. s7.invisionfree.com
14. en.wikipedia.org
15. www.beavercheese.com
16. www.google.com.br
17. www.bbc.co.uk
18. dlisted.blogspot.com
19. www.netvibes.com
20. www.zealivityfive.com

There are already a couple of sites there that I’d never visited and this is one of the facets of Chatsum we’ll really be pushing once we’ve gone Public Beta. In many respects it’s not large aggregations like the one above that we’ll be using to suggest sites. Instead we want to harness the Long Tail of our users to take you to sites you’ve never heard of before.

Well, with a simple logout, close and reopen of the sidebar, you’ll find that Chatsum now comes with an all new and exciting sound effect engine. If you’re one of those people that hates sound effects, don’t worry, there’s a preference to turn them off in the ‘Places to Chatsum’ drawer.

We’ve deliberately kept the number of sounds minimal because we’d like you to tell us what you think it needs. The main purpose of the sounds (at the moment) is to alert you to incoming chat if you have Firefox in the background. You can also use the fantastic All-In-One Sidebar extension to collapse Chatsum without closing it so you can browse full screen and hear if there’s any chat going on.

We currently have sounds for changes to the number of people in the room and for when new chat arrives - let us know what you think needs sound and what you think it should sound like by commenting on this post.

If you look in the preferences section of the drawer, you’ll also see a ‘Default to Page Chat Mode’ checkbox. Turning this on will try to keep you in page chat, rather than site chat, as much as possible. Hopefully this will mean that comments will start to become much more page specific and will alleviate the problems we’ve had with people commenting on specific Digg, Flickr or BBC News articles in the main domain space. Turn it on and see if you like it!

Lastly, we’ve updated the Known Bugs and Current Road Map pages and made them permanently accessible from the menu on the right of this site. Take a look at the Road Map to see what we’re currently working on.

At last, spring has arrived in London and slowly Team Chatsum is beginning to emerge from its bleak February hibernation. We’re hoping to go live with a couple of minor improvements tomorrow whilst the work on member pages and OS X widget continues.

Until I post about the new features tomorrow, why not take a look at a really ugly photo of me over at Fred Bordage’s Blog that Web. The photo accompanies an interview about Web 2.0 we did back in January and is part of a series of Web 2.0 company profiles Fred is publishing. The Pandora, Chatsum and Eurekster interviews are already up with FeedBurner, LinkedIn, Rollyo, Carson Systems and Digg coming soon.

The same interview was also published in French by ZDNet.fr so if French is your preferred language you might want to check it out there instead.