chat room

Josh Miller is hosting a house party for the Internet and everyone is invited. The party, called Potluck, starts now and its purpose is to introduce today's generation of social networkers to people beyond their immediate friend circles.

"Most people ... have always known the Internet as a place where you only connect with people you know," Miller told CNET. "So how do we encourage them to connect with new people?"

The answer is Potluck, a social application for meeting strangers in a non-threatening environment. Actually, though, it's just a fun place to hang out … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 show:

- Soccer to adapt goal line, ball-tracking technology.

- Friday's history lesson: AOL's longest running employee on the history of AOL chat rooms.

- British Airways will google passengers in preflight.

- Hillbilly Alabamians celebrate Fourth of July by shooting guns into air.

- Best Buy lays off 650 Geek Squad employees nationwide.

Bathroom break video: Super Moonwalking!… Read more

Sometimes a man can be betrayed by his wife in a good way.

A 61-year-old woman from Bridgend, Wales, had been married to her husband, for almost 20 years when, according to a court report from the Telegraph, she noticed a curious message on their computer at home.

She focused and realized that the message had been sent by an underage girl to whom her husband had been sending messages in a chat room. The message was of a sexual nature and included her husband's original message to the girl.

Perhaps some spouses would have been so stunned as … Read more

debbiefromtoronto from the chat room joins The 404 today all the way from Canada. Of course, she brings her special Canadian goodies, like ketchup potato chips and Smarties, on to the show. Justin falls in love with her when he finds out that she has a bachelor's degree in printing! And she reveals that she was the one who actually coined the phrase "ear douching."

On today's show, we touch on the iPhone OS 3.0 news. Mostly, Jeff takes credit for the shake-to-shuffle feature. While Wilson flips out over the new dock input/output features. We also speculate on the new iPhone revision this summer. Also, a really bad Chinese iPhone joke: Ping Guo i-Dian Hua San-Ge. Ask your Chinese friends what that means.

In other phone news, we get a little excited over Google Voice. Wilson was previously a Grand Central user, but may pick it back up now that Google Voice forwards SMS messages as well. Justin thinks about signing up for an account to call Debbie when she goes home to Canada.

Finally, a man gets shot while wearing a Joker costume. He was holding a shotgun. He wasn't shot for his lack of creativity. And in other shooting-related news, Sega breaks the record for most f-bombs in a video game for House of the Dead: Overkill. Apparently there are a 189 f-bombs.

Dan Levy has us on his podcast On the DL, where we discuss the future of online media and why Wilson hates the chat room. Twitter says that Justin is the best dressed on the show. T-Mobile announces a $50 unlimited voice calling plan. Justin's dad kills the world's largest rat. Nintendo launches the DSi, and Boxee pulls Hulu support as well as TV.com. Wow, we are actually discussing some technology news today.

Brought to us by voice mail, the biggest news of the day is that your favorite podcast, The 404, is No. 8 on iTunes … Read more

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) clients don't usually get the exposure that some of the other, more well-known chat clients do, but they can be even more useful than their big-name cousins. While most online chat has evolved into a way to communicate exclusively with friends, family, and co-workers, you can still meet new people with common interests if you use the right program.

Join Jason Parker in this First Look video to find out more about mIRC and to see if Internet Relay Chat is your cup of tea. Packed with useful features, it's easy to see how … Read more

Kyte.tv is a new service that lets people create their own TV channel. It's a bit of a mashup between a live blogging tool, a social network, and some of the live Internet TV channels we've been seeing lately with Justin.tv, and UStream.tv. Although, instead of strapping a camera to your head, you can use a cell phone.

The mobile client is a small Java application for several Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones that allows Kyte.tv users to upload photos and chat with others in a Kyte.tv channel. The mobile live blogging component is called "Lifecasting" which lets users upload pictures from their camera phone in real time. You can set it to automatically take a picture every few minutes, or every time you click the shutter. Either way, photos will show up on your channel instantly and viewers will get a visual notification that you're "live."

Kyte.tv channel owners can create as many channels as they want and add music, photos, videos, polls and text. A channel consists of a display screen, a playlist, and integrated chat room. Each channel also gets its own custom URL and branding, which is chosen by the channel owner. Alternately, there's embed code to place the entire Kyte.tv experience on a social networking profile or blog post (like we've done after the break).

One thing to note about adding music: you can't upload your own tracks. Instead you have to pick from a small selection of music from indie music service IODA. It's a lot like the music integration you get with Photobucket's video Remix tool.

What Kyte.tv has done really well is the live chat room. While it's lacking admin controls and private conversation options, you're getting the same chat experience on your computer and your phone. It's also really easy to use, as long as you're handy with your phone's keypad.

Kyte.tv is a fun service that opens up a lot of options for live blogging. Like we've seen with Twitter, mobile blogging has exploded with the help of easy-to-use tools that can be used and accessed on multiple platforms. Likewise, live video broadcasting has become something normal people can do with services like Pocketcaster and UStream.tv. Kyte.tv is happy medium between the two.

We'll be broadcasting live at various points during the day, so to visit our Kyte.tv channel, just click the read more link below.… Read more

YackPack, the group Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) chat and messaging service we covered last month, has launched a new zero-configuration widget to complement its chatting service. The new widget can be placed in blogs, Web sites, social networking profiles, and forums--practically anywhere embeds are allowed. It's dead simple with a single button you push to talk with others. There's no registration, and no need to install any software--it just works.

The widget has three flavors: one that starts live (meaning you hear others chatting whether you want to or not), an opt-in that requires user input to begin, and a custom URL version that will work across your entire site, no matter how many different pages you embed it in. In all the versions, there's a small number in the bottom right-hand corner that will let you know how many other people are using the widget. If you've had enough of their chatter, there's an X button on the top right to put the widget to sleep.

The Walkie-talkie widget joins YackPack's YackPlayer widget, which lets users embed and share audio messages in a way similar to Jaxtr's VoiceBlast, which we wrote about earlier this week. See also Snapvine.

We've embedded the widget after the break to speed up our page load, so just click "Read More" to begin chatting with other Webware readers. … Read more

Lingr is a really slick chat service that launched late last year. Lingr lets you create and manage Web chatrooms, combined with some handy technologies to help you keep track of conversations, even when you're not there.

I recently broke down a few of the top apps for chatting, both Web based and software downloads, but Lingr is a straight up chat destination as opposed to a piggy-backing service. Lingr lets you create your own tags for a chat room to make it easily searchable by others. These tags show up in a tag cloud on the front door … Read more