Founder Video Demo: Firefly Live Chat Application

Firefly founder (?) Billy Chasen presented his application last night at the NY Tech Meetup. Firefly is part of Betaworks which looks like half-startup incubator, half-vc. Firefly is a real-time online chat application that doesn’t require an installation. It’s a "cute" application in its design and innovative. It actually reminds me of those applications that popup when you are on a commerce site where a customer service rep asks if you’d like some help.

What I don’t get is why this is better than hooking up a Meebo Room or any of the other embeddable online chat applications. Sure, Firefly is cute, but outside of that, what is it really? It’s an online chat app that’s limited to one page chatting. I’d much rather chat with users across a site. Also, for the majority of sites online, there will never be more than one person inside of the Firefly application – remember not only do you have to be on the same page as everyone else, you have to "install" the application. The Firefly site seems to indicate you will chat with everyone currently on the site not the individual story but that might actually make the conversation even more confusing.

What I heard after the demo was over was two main things. First, the name is close to firefox and the URL is actually "firef.ly" – this means for all time they will have to tell new users that it’s "firefly – that’s firef.ly" – you can see in the demo that Billy struggled telling the viewers the link. I’d suggest a name change now in case the tool gets popular. The other main feedback was that the tool seems more of an annoyance when one is trying to read a story. The way the tool is setup is that you can turn it on and off whenever you’d like so I would see a user reading the story then turning it on. This tool is more of an anonymous chat than a friend chat like Twitter/IM is.

Peter Kafka calls it a "feature not a business" and suggests that Firefly could charge Web sites to install the functionality. I disagree. Peter goes on to call it a "ADD Twitter" and again I disagree. While it’s smart to try to leverage Twitter as part of the explanation, it’s nowhere near the realm of Twitterville. If we put both companies on a map, Twitter would be the U.S. and Firefly would be Poland – that’s how close the services are to each other.