Velvet Puffin falls flat
No area is as crowded as chat. There’s GTalk, Yahoo IM, AIM, MSN, Meebo, eBuddy, Pownce, and other IM services, all pushing technology forward in various ways.
The latest entrant is Velvet Puffin. It is pushing boundaries with IM, giving it features that appear to make it more integrated with your desktop. Like Meebo Rooms, it lets you paste links to documents such a videos into chat, and friends can view them. It is accessible over mobile phones.
The site is a web-based IM aggregator, meaning it lets you correspond with buddies via other IM services from a single place. In this way, it is like market leaders Meebo and eBuddy.
However, the overall affect is off-putting. Like the art world has Velvet Elvis paintings, the instant messaging world has Velvet Puffin. Both are kitsch and somehow have their own audiences.
We disliked it because the site provides another layer of interface before we can IM and share files — without introducing enough new and useful features to justify the trade-off.
After a few lines of chat here among VentureBeat writers, we abandoned it.
To be fair, other features are notable.
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Velvet Puffin has a “quick launch” feature, where you first open up a pop-up window from the Velvet Puffin site. Then, if you minimize your browser view but keep the chat pop-up open, you can launch widgets from the chat window that appear to be desktop-based (see screenshot taken from a demo video — as the application obscured the desktop on this writer’s Intel-based Mac).
Besides IM, you can launch a “my blog” widget where you can leave posts that other Velvet Puffin users can see and comment on even if you have a web browser closed.
As mentioned above, you can also add, view, share and comment on photos and videos from within the faux-desktop. As far as slick desktop features go, you can drag-and-drop pictures from your desktop into the photo viewer.
Also, we’re not fans of other sites with somewhat ugly interfaces, such as MySpace. That service is still growing robustly, so what do we know. Through a recent deal, Velvet Puffin’s mobile software is now accessible to users of Singtel, a pan-Asian mobile carrier with 124 million users. This could help it. Other companies, like Mig33, have been able to grow rapidly in Asia by combining IM and mobile features in a way that fits untapped markets there.
You can access a tour of Velvet Puffin here.
The mobile version requires a phone that can download and run its Java-based client; Velvet Puffin actually launched with a desktop download, as well, but seems to have ditched it in favor of “quick launch.”
A Velvet Elvis is sometimes called a Velvis. Perhaps we should say Vuffin.
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About the Author, Eric Eldon
Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.
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Hank Li