BS: Fed Up With ICQ and It's Crumby Chat?

Subject: Fed Up With ICQ and It's Crumby Chat?
From: Clinton Hammond2
Date: 17 Feb 00 - 01:04 PM

If ICQ bugs have got ya down ya may wanna have a look at this other free communication tool....

PowWow

It's more of a chat program than a message program, or so I found,but it doesn have some very fine chat features... more stable than ICQ Active List server (Which I'm starting to think is a virus like Windowz 95!)... can have a dedicated chat room set up.... It's free as well....

And othere stuff that escapes me at the moment...

Any one interested in trying it out sometime?

;-)

Subject: RE: BS: Fed Up With ICQ and It's Crumby Chat?
From: Clinton Hammond2
Date: 17 Feb 00 - 01:31 PM

PowWow Features & Benefits

Experience communicating over the Internet the fun and easy way using PowWow today! The free downloadable version of PowWow includes these and many other features:

Instant messages: These instant alerts pop up like sticky notes on other users' screens. If a recipient is away from her machine or her computer is off, an optional link to her e-mail server puts the message in her e-mail system.

Buddy lists: This built-in list alerts users whenever a buddy comes online and is available.

InstaVoice: The first Internet-based instant voice messaging solution, InstaVoice enables users to record and send messages of up to one minute in length (15 Kbytes) with automatic 50:1 compression that lets voices sound natural.

Voice Chat: Talk to PowWow users worldwide for no more than the cost of your Internet connection. With PowWow's Voice Chat, you can talk via the Internet just like you would on a telephone - this virtually eliminates your long distance phone bill.

Group Chat: Participate in community discussions and interact with others in real-time via the Group Chat window. Enter and view text on-screen or use the text-to-speech option to listen to the online discussion.

Real-time point-to-multi-point communications: PowWow goes a step beyond many other chat products by being truly real-time. Community members or buddies can establish point-to-multi-point sessions that enable up to nine people to chat at once using text or voice.

Text to voice: PowWow's "robot" voice allows users to hear text as it appears in a window. The voice plays commonly used abbreviations as sounds. For example, type "LOL" ("laugh out loud") and the robot laughs. (My note: the robot is a little creepy at first, but once ya've tweaked the settings you can usually make something 'almost' human sounding...)

Web tours: This option lets a PowWow user lead a group on a Web site tour by remotely directing their Web browsers to selected pages. Participants discuss pages as they travel, enabling multiple levels of interaction simultaneously.

Bulletin Board: Different from the Group Chat window, the PowWow Bulletin Board is an area where you and other visitors to a Community can leave electronic messages or questions. PowWow Community Hosts and other users can easily respond to your message by replying with their own posting. Bulletin Boards make a great place to share information with other Community members.

White Pages: A comprehensive listing of users' personal profiles that helps users find people with common interests.

White boarding: This enables users to exchange sketches and scribbles. White boarding is also great for corporate brainstorming sessions.

Games: Play cards, checkers, dominoes, chess, backgammon and dice across the Internet.

Impressive no??

Subject: RE: BS: Fed Up With ICQ and It's Crumby Chat?
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 17 Feb 00 - 01:34 PM

Will look later.

Re Active List, I am not convinced that the program is particularly unstable and proved to be more reliable than the ordinary ICQ rooms for last nights chats - in fact the only problem that I am aware of is that bth Nancy and LEJ were unable to join the list and I am looking into that. Otherwise, it worked well for the session and the usual problems involving the need for invites, people not seeing one another and getting booted for no apparrent reason were all iliminnated. Although nobody else has suceeded in hosting my list, I fell that AL is stable overall and that the bulk of the remaining prblems are related to my ISP disconnecting me after 3 hours which doesn't put me in a good position to attempt to host anything although as I did last night, I shut dwn and restarted 15 mins befre MCR to ensure there were in problems on that issuse.

I would certainly be interested to know what else is on offer, particularly if a MC develped room is imminent.

Jon

Subject: RE: BS: Fed Up With ICQ and It's Crumby Chat?
From: Jon Freeman
Date: 17 Feb 00 - 01:59 PM

Sorry Clinton but further thoughts...

I am not going to pretend that ICQ is ideal or anything else. I dn't Max's time shcedule but I am aware that he is looking into various options and presumably will implement something in the forseeabble future.

In an attempt to help and offer what are workable iinterim slolutins, I have made a prgram avaialable to lock the chat button on hearme and offered a room with fewer time out restrictions. I have additionaly set up an ICQ list which proved itself last night to ease the prbblems during MCR...

This is all workablle and untill we knw where Max is ging, I think trying to add other facilities can only add to confusion

Jon

Subject: RE: BS: Fed Up With ICQ and It's Crumby Chat?
From: Clinton Hammond2
Date: 17 Feb 00 - 02:21 PM

That was not my intent... To add to the confusion.. but just to suggest an alternative... I was not aware that MAx was looking for alternatives... Maybe PowWow is the thing for him...

The active list bugs... well, ICQ itself is a BETA so it's twitchy at times , and the active list even more so...

Perhaps a couple (or more) of us out here can test PowWow and submit our reviews for Max??

Subject: RE: BS: Fed Up With ICQ and It's Crumby Chat?
From: SeanM
Date: 17 Feb 00 - 05:24 PM

Max IS looking into something else. He's mentioned a few times in messages that out on Mudcat Beta, he's working on something integrated into the site.

Don't know if either of you were around for it, but for a while we had an (I believe) applet based chat running, specifically dedicated via the website. Different versions were attempted, but as I understand it, the programming was a bit buggy in the interface.

M