Chat Catcher: Evolution
I’ve been working feverishly on my main development project, Chat Catcher. That’s the service that scans Twitter, Indenti.ca, and FriendFeed for blog comments. When Chat Catcher finds a comment, it posts it back to the original blog post. If you’ve spent any time here, you’ll see Twitter comments on many of the posts; that’s Chat Catcher. It’s a fun project, but I haven’t written much about it…because I’ve been working so hard on it. I even skipped an entire chapter of Chat Catcher’s evolution as it pulled itself from the brink of the deadpool and returned, Sawyer-esque to witness its own funeral.
But the past couple of weeks have been a bit unreal for me. When I was having trouble funding Chat Catcher, Neville Hobson, a famous blogger and happy Chat Catcher user, wrote a post called Chat Catcher Needs a White Knight. Within a few days, that post brought me together with an extraordinary group of gentlemen in the UK. The relationship has resulted in the following announcement:
Chat Catcher is pleased to announce the completion of an investment round with Ocasta Labs, an early stage technology investment group. Ocasta Labs have injected both funds and resources to extend the Chat Catcher team and to accelerate development of the service.
So the big news is that Chat Catcher will not only continue to exist, it will thrive. Ocasta Labs will help me strengthen the Chat Catcher service, and we’ll even evolve the service so that it keeps pace with the constantly changing world of social media.
If you have a blog, any type of blog, give Chat Catcher a try. There’s a special plugin for WordPress and John Eckman recently released a Drupal Module. If you download the WordPress plugin, there’s even a framework that allows you to build a custom plugin for other types of blogs [yes, I know I need to document this].
For me, this is an exciting service, and I’m happy to be joining forces with some really exceptional people who’ll help me expand its features. Do I know exactly what those features are today? — honestly no, but there are some amazing possibilities. It may sound odd to most people, but writing code and developing systems is fun, and I’m having a blast working through the evolution of Chat Catcher.
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Is chat catcher still working? I’ve been looking into installing it on my Drupal site but can’t find the registration page?
Hi @Bekka,
We just took Chat Catcher offline Nov. 1st. Sorry about that. I contacted the author of the Drupal plugin, but he may not have had time to remove the plugin.