Santa Monica, California-based PeopleLink Inc, a web community services firm, is planning a major new service for January that will bundle together all existing web chat services and sell them as a single package the company CEO, Steve Glenn told ComputerWire. At the same time it will announce a leading media company as the first customer of this new service, although could not disclose any more details on this.
PeopleLink provides its customers including iVillage and the Times Mirror Group with real-time chat rooms, instant messaging, message boards, interest groups/CLUBS, e-mail discussion groups, user directories/profiles and community management services.
Most of the web sites out there today don’t have the complete set of community services, said Glenn. They might offer realtime chat groups, or one-to-one messaging, but rarely give the customer a choice of the full spectrum of community services. He said that they also do not offer links from their content to the communities of people interested in that information. Glenn said that PeopleLink is working on ways that encourage consumers to stick to a site. One third of the people who visit a web site want to connect to other people who visit that site and then they will stay longer, he said. Amazon claims that its two million user reviews of books and CDs is one of the main reasons customers come back to its site.
