Snyggast Chatten
"Snyggast Chatten – A Swedish youth chat where over ten thousands people meets daily to talk, discuss and enjoy themselves”
Snyggast Chattens framsida
Online since 2001 Snyggast Chatten is my longest spanning project yet. What I started as a challenge five years ago has evolved to a full-fledged community with over ten thousand users daily. Technically it’s a heavyweight: a well-balanced mix of HTML/CSS and AJAX for the user and Flash/ Perl/ PHP/ mySQL balanced over several servers. These servers are handling IRC (chat), Web cams, SMS, Logging, spam protection and more. But for the user all this is a smooth ride. Sign in, log on, view pictures, use your web cam, dig through archives. Express yourself. Enjoy yourself.
The chat is unique in the way in which it is connected to the main site that is originally an image community. You may choose to chat either in public in any or our rooms but also in private. When talking in private you will see the other person’s images, you’ll see their age and in which town they live in.
The crew
I am the lead developer in charge of design, programming and implementation. I am also the lead administrator and with a crew of ten helping to keep track of our users.
Constant development
It is under constant development evolving with its users. We recently integrated Google Adsense with great success and we are currently looking into integrating MMS, fine tuning our spam protection and creating an automated user based report system. This will make our users feel safer and more willingly report rule violations. It will also lower our response time and work load since the logs have been automatically collected and processed.
MSN
We are also working on integrating MSN in our systems since it is a great way of communicating with our users. They’ll then get messages on MSN when their friends are online on our chat, has added pictures to their presentation, their rule violation report has been processed or when a number of other actions occur. The goal is – in a none-intrusive way – to be more visible and active in their everyday life. They will get real-time information of their choice and we will get happier, more loyal users.
Streaming video
Not only can they see images from the main site but also real-time using their web cam. Back stage we have a Flash Media Server streaming the video to other users.
