Now with more sociability
Profiles
Lingr is, of course, purely social. We built it so that you can chat, anytime, with anyone. Our focus since we launched last August has been to make Lingr the best damn chat program you’ve ever seen.
Now that we’ve got that well under control, we’ve begun to enhance the other aspects of the site. Over the next few months we’ll be rolling out many social features. First up is the most commonly requested: Chatter profiles.
When you’re chatting in a room, just click on a name in the list of chatters in the sidebar on the right.
...And that chatter’s profile will drop down for you to see.
To add something to your own profile, choose My account from the My stuff menu at the top of the window. Or, if you take a look at your own profile, you can just follow the link there to add whatever you want to it. Or, go straight to your account now and get started!
Having your own profile is one of the advantages of a Lingr account. Other advantages: You can upload any image you want to use as your icon; you can create your own rooms; you can keep track of your favorite rooms; and more! A Lingr account is free, and all you need to sign up is an email address. So go ahead and sign up.
Chatrooms
We’ve spent a lot of time working on the layout of the chatroom. That’s the heart of Lingr, and we want it to work as well as it possibly can. We’re constantly trying new things, tweaking the details, and playing around to see what works, what works best, and what doesn’t work at all.
Luckily, we get a lot of feedback about the chatrooms. That feedback, combined with our own work, has resulted in a number of refinements to the chatroom layout.
For instance, we realized that our logo was taking up far too much space — space that could be better used by your content. So now you’ll see that the logo in the chatrooms is much smaller, and sits up in the corner, same as every other page on Lingr.
If you pay close attention as you’re chatting, you’ll probably see the logo change colors from time to time. Those color changes (and the accompanying text) keep track of your connection to our servers. If something goes wrong, the logo will turn red, and you’ll see a little note warning you of the problem. When you’ve just entered a room, and your browser is trying to connect to our servers so that you can start chatting, the logo will turn grey. But most of the time it will just be its usual bright self, indicating that everything’s working as it should.
We’ve also made some adjustments so that you can see more of the chatter list at a time. (You’ll see the difference in every browser except for Internet Explorer 6, for Windows. If you’re still using IE6, we strongly suggest you try out Firefox, which is free and secure and fast and generally fantastic, or at least upgrade to IE7. Please.)
Also, we’ve abbreviated the room descriptions that appear in each room, as well as the tag cloud. To see more of either, just click the more link that appears after each one.
For a while we had things set up so that when you click on a link from within a chatroom, that link would open in a new window. It was an experiment, since people had complained that they kept accidently leaving the room they were in. But it was an experiment that failed: We heard from you in even larger numbers that popping up new windows is annoying at best, and downright evil at worst. So the only links that pop up now are those pasted into the chat itself. Let us know if that works better for you.
Et cetera
As always, we’ve made a slew of minor improvements to the site. About 50 recent changes, adjustments, and fixes, if my quick count is accurate.
And please remember to let us know what you think of Lingr. User requests and comments are central to our work — so get in touch!
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