With FriendFeed rooms and Twitter groups applications springing up, could it be that real-time chat rooms are reemerging as a popular online trend? Drop.io, the site mainly known for fast and easy file sharing, is testing that very notion with their brand new service, conference.io, which is designed for group-oriented rich media chat.
Drop.io, which recently went 100% real-time for file sharing and collaboration, is now extending its real-time capabilities with their rich media chat room offering: conference.io. Users can expect drop.io standard settings like naming spaces, setting passwords, and assigning guest permissions. And, similar to drop.io, hitting the "drop it" button instantly creates a live, browser-based, chat room with a shareable URL to invite collaborators.
Conference.io's rich media chat spaces support file uploads that appear in-line in the chat thread. Users can click on individual photos, documents, and other assets to add comments to an item, which are also then added in-line to the core chat view.
Conference.io also works with third-party clients like Jabber and XMPP clients, so all users need is the stream key, available from the admin panel, to join a group chat session from their preferred client. In the same vein, the conference.io real-time stream can be accessed and updated from smart phones by going to http://drop.io/[dropname]/chat.
