Publish GTalk status to your website and chat with visitors

One of the many benefits of using Google Talk is that you can publish your status to any website and allow your web visitors to chat with you. This is a great feature for service providers like daSilvaTek, where customer service is always first priority and we make every effort to make ourselves through different means. With this methodology, you can add your GTalk status to any HTML site and customize the "badge" to your liking - let me show you how.

First things first, you need a GTalk account! If you don't already have one, or if you've been hiding under a rock and don't know Google, go get yourself an account - I recommend starting at Google Mail, which sets you up universally across their product lines. When it comes to using GTalk, you have options: download client software to your PC or use the GMail web interface with GTalk enabled.

After you have familiarized yourself with the chat features and buddies list, it's time to generate the HTML code that you can use universally, further customize to your liking, and even generate multiple "badges" for different applications: http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New

Go ahead and press the Edit button and try a few different "badges" and options. When you are happy with the result, copy the HTML code at the bottom of the page and get ready to paste it to your website! If you are not completely happy with the Google-provided options for editing, now is the time edit the HTML code to your liking and test it out on your website.

For example, visitors to this blog you will see that on the right-hand side of the page, there is a Google Talk section and one of the default Google-provided "badges", which suits most folks just fine. If I was looking to add a simple "green dot" status with my name, I could use Google's "One line basic" format, copy that HTML to a notepad and customize it as follows (I edited a small portion of my token code for privacy):

<a href="http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/Start?tk=z01q6amlq925d6qk2b1k15jq6labuqf09cea0tkh4ed0v0svh58kge3f7qe3qfhrpdnq7g8lps8akareelv731nuu7adjkrju1okl93djd3w9udjdsiw9e3udkds0oswj6o22vjf0s038nuhc856ea50b01qbmhjce" target="_blank" title="Click here to chat with daSilvaTek">daSilvaTek</a>

Produces the following result:

This method makes it simpler to customize the contact list, for example if you wanted your website visitors to interact with multiple employees, or dispatch the visitor's concern to the appropriate party (eg: sales team, support group, night watchman, etc). Here is an example, assuming everybody is offline and unavailable (ie: asleep):

I hope you enjoyed this post so much you can't wait to get started on your own implementation. Merry web chatting with your website visitors and customers. Look for our next post on how to integrate Google Voice into the mix!