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_

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.

A very quick post to say that the Chatsum 0.4 extension is now available. This version adds Flock and Firefox 1.5.0.1 compatibility.

Existing users of Chatsum 0.3 can upgrade via the Firefox Extensions window and 0.4 has become the default download during the registration process for beta testers.

A note to Flock users:
As Flock doesn’t have a View -> Sidebar menu, to active Chatsum, you’ll have to use the Ctrl-Alt-C keyboard shortcut or add the Chatsum button to your toolbar via the View -> Toolbars -> Customise… menu. Just drag the green orb to your toolbar.

This is the list of bugs that we’re currently aware of - we’ll cross them off the list as we squash them.

1. Posts sometimes appear twice in the chat transcript.

2. Posts from room A sometimes appear in room B when switching from one to the other.

3. Non-Latin text appears garbled on the Chatsum website.

4. Staying in a room for a very long time causes sluggish behaviour.

5. The Ctrl-Alt-C shortcut sometimes fails to toggle the Chatsum sidebar (Note: this appears to be a Firefox bug, at least on Mac OS. If you experience this bug try clicking on the Firefox window and pressing Ctrl-Alt-C again. If it still doesn’t work please let us know).

6. OS X Firefox in some cases refuses to install the extension. We’ve had reports of the url not loading or of the extension appearing in the Extensions window and then disappearing. Any more reports from people having trouble installing would be great as we haven’t been able to recreate this in the lab.

We’re pleased to announce that we will be releasing version 0.3 of the Chatsum Firefox extension to our beta testers this Friday.

If you’ve already signed up to beta test, we will direct you towards a Register page this Friday. This page will allow you to choose a screen name, text colour and password for Chatsum. Once you have registered, you’ll see the installation instructions for the Chatsum 0.3 extension. Please don’t waste your time installing the extension from the Mozilla Add-ons site, we will provide you with a link to the latest version on Friday.

If you haven’t already signed up, we are no longer accepting applications for this initial test. We hope to expand the test to more users as soon as possible, so please enter your e-mail in the sign-up box (in the top-right) and we’ll e-mail you as soon as we’re ready for ‘Phase Two’.

I’ve just posted some ‘in use’ screenshots over on Flickr. We’ll be using this set to quickly publish pictures to thoughout the development of Chatsum. Take a look:

http://flickr.com/photos/imgeorge/sets/1794198/

So, we’ve just entered Chatsum into the Extend Firefox Contest over at the Mozilla Developer Center. We really had to work hard to get it ready for the competition which meant missing out on some of the Christmas Holidays but it was definitely worth it.

Because we’ve only just opened up the beta via this website I hope the judges will be able to see past the current lack of users. We’ve given them two accounts to play with so if you see any comments from Mozilla1 or Mozilla2 you know who they’re from.

We’re hoping to go on a big marketing push next week to pull in more beta testers. If you’re reading this and still haven’t signed up please do, there’s now a form on the right of this page.