find+attract

Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, and Chatcatcher. Wait, Chat-wha?

Ok, Chatcatcher hasn’t gotten the same publicity as the first two. Also, Shannon Whitley, (@swhitley) Chatcatcher’s creator isn’t an online giant on the order of the first two. However, stay with me here, there’s a good reason I include Chatcatcher in the same sentence.

The first two facilitate site integration with two of the most popular platforms for a person’s online identity, Facebook and Google. Chatcatcher facilitates integration with a third, Twitter (and actually a fourth and fifth because it works with FriendFeed and Identi.ca too.) I would say Twitter, and microblogs in general are fast becoming as relevant as the first two, and probably in some ways more relevant than Google profiles. Up until now, there wasn’t a good way to integrate the microblogging community with your blog or site. Sure you could push your own Twitter updates to a widget on your site, but really couldn’t allow for Twitter-user initiated interaction.

This brings us to Chatcatcher. For my recruiting and sourcing friends, bear with me this is relevant to you.

Here’s the gist. Someone posts a tweet about a blog post or site article of yours. They include a link to that post, either the full URL, or a shortened version. Chatcatcher sees it, and auto-magically posts it as a comment or trackback to that post on your site.

Here’s the rub.

1. Chatcatcher provides a clickable link to the twitter handle of the person tweeting about your post.

2. No matter what URL shortening service is used, Chatcatcher grabs it.

3. Chatcatcher is compatible with one of the best comments plugins Disqus.

4. Avatars are present in the Chatcatcher comments.

5. Chatcatcher also provides you the ability to track Chatcatcher comment totals and grab an RSS feed of all the people referencing your site in twitter.

6. Chatcatcher works with FriendFeed (and now Identi.ca) as well.

7. Setting up Chatcatcher is fairly simple. Trust me on this, I’m no developer and I got it figured out. Plus, Shannon Whitley is extremely responsive and helpful. He created a wordpress plug-in for us Wordpress users, and also a script for non-wordpress sites. (Quick tidbit: I knew this guy was smart when I found out he created a Twitter client in MS Excel. No kidding.)

Here’s why all of the above is good.

1. Previously, Tweets about your site were not connected to your site in any way, unless you somehow manually did it.

2. Now, the folks who tweet about your site, and ReTweet about your site, and the regular commenters on your posts can see each other, on your post. This is the really cool part.

Simply put, it re-connects the conversation to the source of the topic, and facilitates connection amongst the people discussing. Put another way, it brings the twitter, friendfeed, or Identi.ca conversation and co-locates it on your site, which is what stimulated the discussion in the first place.

There are other apps that attempt the same thing as Chatcatcher, but Chatcatcher is the best for all the reasons I mention above. See below for how it works.

So, recruiting and sourcing friends. Tell me your thoughts, why is this relevant to what we do? I have my own ideas, but I’d prefer to hear yours.