Envolve: A Facebook-Like Chat Room for Your Site

Envolve: A Facebook-Like Chat Room for Your Site

How do you get your users to interact with each other? That's a question Envolve, a new Facebook-like chat feature for websites, is trying to solve. While we have seen a number of similar services in the past, Envolve is one of the best website chat tools we have seen so far. While most sites now give users the ability to comment on blog posts or review products, website chats like Envolve offer a far more interactive experience by allowing users to chat with each other in real time.

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Websites are Lonely Places

As Envolve's marketing materials point out, "websites are lonely places." While we can go to Twitter and Facebook to discuss a site, there is often very little real-time interaction between users on the site itself (except, of course, when site owners use a real-time commenting system like JS-Kit's Echo).

What makes Envolve so interesting, is that it allows you to create numerous topic chat rooms on your site. This, for example, allows you to create one room to answer customer service questions and another that allows users to discuss a specific product or a new feature you just launched. By default, all users remain anonymous, though they can opt to use their real name or even create an Envolve account. The service also features private chats and the ability to block abusive users. Admins can also permanently ban any user.

Pricing

Installing the service is as easy as copying and pasting a few lines of code into your website's HTML template. The company also offers a plugin for Wordpress sites. For small sites, Envolve offers a free plan that supports up to 5 simultaneous users. Paid plans start at $9 per month for up to 10 connected visitors and go up to $99 per month with support for up to 200 concurrent visitors. All of the paid and free accounts also feature real-time visitor statistics and the ability to customize the color of the chat rooms.