An upgrade rolled out to Wibiya today brings live chat to any website running the popular social toolbar.
The new chat widget connects to Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo or MySpace to bring real-time chat to customer’s websites, which can be moderated from within the Wibiya dashboard. If somebody in a chat room starts busting out a bunch of racial epithets, for example, the site owner can remove the comments or ban the user all together.
Wibiya supports both public and private chats, whether they be amongst groups of people or one-on-one exchanges.
The toolbar, which is used to integrate social media, language translation, site search and content sharing tools into any website, is currently used by over 70,0000 active sites. Since going live in June 2009, Wibiya has been regularly adding new applications for users to include on their custom, embeddable toolbars.
It should be noted that Wibiya is not the first social toolbar to offer this functionality. The more stripped-down Meebo Toolbar has featured live chats for some time, but without all the extra bells and whistles that Wibiya has.
A feature like live chats might not be terribly useful for smaller product sites with little in the way of an engaged community around them, but for companies looking to build their online audience and increase engagement on their websites, toolbars like this can be quite helpful.
