BBCi Connector in The Guardian

This week's Guardian web watch was plugging the BBCi Connector - its an app a very close friend of mine did the original product development on 18-or-so months ago.

I have always thought it was a fantastic sevice for the BBC to have on the bbc.co.uk site - it combines the immediacy of IM, without generating the signal-to-noise ratio that messagebaords do, and the transient nature makes it less of a problem for archiving. The BBC has also put a huge effort into working out how it is possible to moderate and make safe a one-to-one (or in this case five-to-five) chat environment.

Unfortunately, the one important thing The Guardian neglected to mention is that as a service it is only available if you are visiting bbc.co.uk followed by /radio1 and /cult. I'm not sure how much the audience overlap is between Radio One, the BBC's geek corner, and The Guardian but I reckon we may face a lot of emails from disgruntled wannabe users who can't get to chat about the Today programme. However, if you try it in the geek flavour you might bump into me - I got too old for Radio One years ago.