Msgr

msgr is a web service you can use to create your own instant messenger. Setup a messenger for your group of friends, e-group, orkut community, visitors to your website, or even your intranet. You can use msgr for free if less than 25 members signup for the messenger you create. If you have a larger member base you can always upgrade.

HeyCosmo

live video conferencing between multiple users, plus the ability to view YouTube videos, photos and blogs, share music and use IM simultaneously in one interface.

Mabber

Mabber, a web-based instant messenger that’s been around for at least a year, relaunched today with a new interface and a series of new features, including a widget that allows your blog visitors to chat with you through your Mabber account and on your phone. Mabber, in case you don’t recall, is a web and mobile-based instant messaging service that aggregates your buddy lists from AIM, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk.

The new stuff includes a new mobile client, Mabber Alerts for RSS on your phone and an interactive Helpbot (lots of fun – play Turing tests with it). Mabber opens new windows for everything – the chat client, configuration and buddy list – but many prefer to have their IM in a new browser window like this, since it’s more like a desktop IM (Meebo does provide a pop-out window as an option).

Mixd

Yahoo! is getting in on the group text messaging biz with the launch of their new site, Mixd. TechCrunch was tipped off to the site’s existence today but we have not been able to determine how long it has been live.

Mixd allows users to set up groups and text or share photos within those groups. Texts and photos can be managed online as well as on a mobile phone.

Text recipients can reply to all, “whisper” by replying to just one other person, or “mute” by turning off the message chain. But judging from some initial testing, all of those functionalities are not the easiest things to figure out. It’s simple enough to sign up for the service but difficult to manage contacts, groups, and the numbers assigned to groups and commands. Yahoo! tries to simplify things by asking users to text a number instead of a word, which I’m not sure makes things simpler.

It looks like Yahoo! is going for the “cool” angle on this one. The “About” page says, “Mixd is about going out. Coordinate last-minute meetups, share pictures and videos from your phone, and remember last night on a website we create for you, automatically.”

font: www.techcrunch.com

Lingr

Lingr is a really slick chat service that launched late last year. Lingr lets you create and manage Web chatrooms, combined with some handy technologies to help you keep track of conversations, even when you’re not there.

I recently broke down a few of the top apps for chatting, both Web based and software downloads, but Lingr is a straight up chat destination as opposed to a piggy-backing service. Lingr lets you create your own tags for a chat room to make it easily searchable by others. These tags show up in a tag cloud on the front door of Lingr.com, and grow with size based on popularity. Clicking any of these tags will pull down a listing of rooms that contain that tag. It feels a little bit like Flickr.

Each chat room is pretty straightforward with a user list and a chat area. Room owners can even upload their own graphic to brand the room. Everything written is automatically archived, and can be seen by everyone, which is a little more obtrusive than some other casual Web chat apps (like Yaplet which only keeps 20 lines of chat), but if you’re used to Gmail-like back-up, Lingr has you covered.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If you want to keep track of live conversations without keeping an open Lingr window, you can use Lingr Radar, which is a small (~400k) download for Mac OSX and Windows. Radar sits on your taskbar (or command bar on a Mac) and pops up with live messages for whatever chat rooms you’ve set up to track. It’s pretty much like an RSS feed for chatrooms. I wouldn’t use this, but it’s nice for people who want to keep an eye on a conversation while doing something else on their computer.

To share a Lingr room with others, you can create a Lingr badge. Each badge shows basic room information like the room name, and how many people are currently in the room. Clicking the link takes you straight to the room (see embed below). You can also use your own CSS to match the look and the feel of the badge with your Web site. This is great for blogs.

Lingr is a simple solution for Web chat. I like that it doesn’t take over your browser window with a sidebar, and the archiving functions are pretty handy if you’re into logging things, or catching up on what’s going on in a conversation. I’d like to see some skinning options to customize the look and feel of rooms a little bit, but as it stands it’s no frills visual style is clean and useful.