P3chat feature that is shining bright is our support for multiple Instant Messenger clients/protocols: Jabber, Yahoo!, ICQ etc. We felt like we cannot force people to start using our application UI or, even worse, switch to another IM. Tools we use must be what is most comfortable to us, especially when it comes to day-to-day job.
That's why it's extremely easy to start using P3chat. No installation is required: you already have all you need — your browser and your IM client.
Currently P3chat supports all of the most popular applications/protocols:
Don't worry if you didn't find your IM client in the list above. Multi-protocol IM clients are almost guaranteed to support one of the protocols above via plugins. So if you use application like Pidgin (Gaim), Miranda IM, Trillian, eBuddy, odds are you are ready for P3chat.
In case if your client supports more than one protocol above, we recommend using XMPP protocol, which is a de facto standard for open communication these days.
Configuration is an important part of every web application and we are proud of our way.
Click Sign Up and you're done with the first step to getting a P3chat widget for your site. Second step is a simple one-page registration form. Step three is to add the Widget HTML Code to your web site. That's it — no other steps are required!
Provided you have your IM client (say, Google Talk) running, you will instantly receive an authorization message. Simply approve this request to add our P3chat robot to your contact list to confirm you want to get messages from P3chat. Depending on your IM client, this operation might be called add friend or roster. After you’ve done that, whenever your customers use P3chat widget, P3chat robot will deliver all the messages from the chat widget to your IM, and back.More info ...
So, you've completed the first time setup, you started using P3chat and everything goes smooth. Hopefully your business is growing, your web site gets more visits and supporting all of your customers now requires more than a single chat operator.
Naturally, you need to add more operators — and you can easily set them up in P3chat configuration interface by specifying their IM accounts and configuring their appearance to the users, like name, profile picture and department name. You can also set how many maximum simultaneous users individual operator can serve depending on his or her performance. We call these channels.
Sometimes, different parts of your web site require different approach to support. For example, the tone you speak with anonymous visitors, with your customers, or with investors may be quite different. P3chat gives you the ability to configure several Departments and apply for them different look-and-feel settings, invitation messages and so on.
How do you know the best performing operator? Or the most successful department? Apparently, by tracking their conversation history. P3chat saves every message on our servers and makes it available for you after Sign In. You can filter your history by individual operator, by department or by date range.
Supporting multiple browsers is an increasingly big challenge for every web developer. This is especially important for widgets.Web site owners & developers put enormous effort into making their businesses look good in the eyes of their diverse customers using Chrome, IE or Firefox on Macs or PCs. This means having a chat widget that supports fewer browsers than the web site itself is not acceptable.
But we all realize that supporting multiple browsers is not a final achievement, but an ongoing task. With new browsers coming and users still not giving up on old or even ancient ones, while mobile platforms getting more and more share at the same time, we all face the challenge of proper multi-browser support. Because of this, we see it is much more important to have a process rather than an initial offering here. And P3chat has one.
P3chat browser support matrix is currently the following:
Follow the updates!
More info ...It is not new and is widely used by many, especially major, players. First comes Graded Browser Support, popularized by Yahoo!. It is based on three important principles:
P3chat has its specifics of this process. We pay more attention to our customers' needs, than to general browser statistics. For example, we see Opera frequently enough in requests to our servers currently. Thus, it has an A-grade despite its relatively low market share.
Second thing is our ongoing commitment to automatic testing. P3chat test framework covers all the newly developed features and automatically checks that all of them work as expected. We have a robust farm of all supported browsers set up and continuously running every test. This ensures we provide the quality of service our customers expect.
Performance is an important aspect of web applications. Users are reluctant to visit pages that take infinity to load. Where 'infinity' is always subjective, but these days as many as a couple of seconds is mostly treated as an 'awful speed'. On the other hand, in the modern world we are lucky enough to have plenty of great embeddable 3rd party components available. So we build our web applications from many pieces by adding more and more 3rd party scripts into our web page, like P3chat widget script. Ensuring good performance in this situation becomes a challenge.More info ...
In P3chat we treat performance seriously. This is true for all aspects of our web application — hosting, server-side and client-side scripts.
We have chosen to use a very robust hosting. The one that Wikipedia uses for Europe traffic, for example. It isn't cheap, but it pays for it. Together with constantly monitored server-side code and database performance, we are seeing very good response times throughout Europe. Other regions are proved to be served at good speed too. But that's not all.
We understand that P3chat widget has its own specifics over other types of embedded code or web services. What's interesting about a chat widget is that users may never decide to go chatting, just because they are not in the mood for talking that morning. Why loading any scripts at all in this case?
P3chat widget uses lazy loading whenever possible. This means only minimal amount of code is loaded during first page load. The rest of the code is loaded only at the moment it is needed. This ensures your site never renders slow because of P3chat. Also this reduces the load on our servers, allowing for better response time for all our customers. It also means our hosting costs remain low which lets us keep the affordable prices for our customers, that is you!
For best service, you would want to use native language in talking to your customers. Knowing that, we designed P3chat with localization in mind from the very beginning. So, P3chat is a truly multi-language tool — both P3chat widget that shows up on your site, and configuration pages you see on this site after you Signing In.
Of course we cannot afford doing a job our customers have not requested yet. So languages available right now are the following:
If you want to see P3chat in a different language than listed above, please email us. We have a special offer for those who can contribute a translation.
Credit: Luso Digital (for Portuguese), Heuzé Florent (for French), Kudest (for Ukranian), Hamid Zaeri (for Persian), Ramón J González (for Spanish and Galician), Christian Marquart (for German), radio.davinci48.ru (for Korean), Azul Group (for Romanian and Catalan), Kim Bruland (for Norwegian), davinci48.ru (for Arabic).
Standards are important in our life. They friendly keep us from reinventing the wheel. That's why we carefully choose standards and protocols that work best for P3chat customers. It's not as trivial as may seem at first glance. Any live online chat requires bidirectional communication between the browser and the server. This contradicts the way traditional communication happens in the Web. Traditionally, the browser acts as a client allowing the user to send requests to the web site, while the server can only respond to browser originated requests, and not vice versa. But for full-fledged chat we need a server to be able to initiate communication too.
Fortunately, this need has been known and got a good bit of research long before P3chat came to existence so several protocols have already been invented, commonly known as Comet methodology. We selected one of these protocols, named BOSH (stands for Bidirectional-streams Over Synchronous HTTP). This is the oldest, full-featured protocol, very well defined and widely implemented. It is also known to have better performance than most other protocols, both in bandwidth efficiency and response time. Our performance standards are strict indeed, so we went for it.
HTML5 is the new markup and API standard for the new Web. We here in P3chat are big fans of HTML5, no doubt about that. Many cool P3chat features are based on wonderful HTML5 offerings. At the end of the day, that's why new standards are created — to help us make new cool and useful apps!
P3chat personalization capability, for example, uses HTML5 Web Storage feature. More intriguing features are under development now and will come soon. Stay tuned!