When was the last time you used a chat service and noticed messages arriving out of order? It’s likely that you can’t think of one. Getting messages to arrive in the right order is more or less job number one of a chat service. Sounds simple. But scale this to millions of users across a global network and it becomes a complex distributed computing problem. Even at smaller scales, message ordering isn’t guaranteed once you go beyond a simple, direct connection between two users.

We’ve had the privilege of working with a wide range of customers including global retailers, CRM vendors, sports franchises, creators, entertainers, and broadcasters - from HubSpot and SportsBet, to 17Live and InvitePeople - providing them with reliable, scalable and low-latency chat. Ably Pub/Sub is already a fantastic fit for a variety of chat use cases.

If you’re one of those website owners or businesses that employ a Facebook live chat widget on their website, this post is more than critical for you. Facebook is very soon (May 9, 2024) about to terminate the operation of its live chat—the embedded widget that allows you to use it as your website chat plugin. Currently, countless users employ Facebook live chat on their websites. All these people must find alternatives to their current plugin once Facebook stops offering its live chat.

This post will walk through the creation of a realtime chat application with Next.js and deploying it to Vercel.

When was the last time you WhatsApped someone? In all likelihood, the answer is probably not that long ago. First released in 2009, WhatsApp quickly became the default setting for instant messaging in much of the world. By 2014, it defined the market so much that it was acquired by Facebook – and it has pretty much remained a leader in the chat space ever since.

In the past decade, chat apps have gone from being a disruptive new technology to something we use every day. Today, WhatsApp boasts over 2 billion daily active users, by far the market leader, followed by WeChat with 1.3 billion and Facebook Messenger at just under 1 billion. Chat apps, put simply, are going nowhere. In that time, customers have come to expect a consistent experience across their chat apps – and a core set of functionality has evolved across all major providers.

In our previous post, we provided the ultimate live chat features list - covering 15 features you should provide in your live chat or instant messaging app. Here, we cover how these features come to life across customer service, gaming, internal company chat, social and community chat, and chat for two way marketplaces.

Chat and instant messaging are a key part of how many applications are driving product adoption, user engagement, and retention. As a product owner or developer, you’re almost spoiled for choice when it comes to deciding how to implement chat in your product. In this article, we’re going to go deep and look at the protocols that power chat.

Live chat is the most common type of realtime web experience. Embedded in our everyday lives, we use messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Slack daily to keep in touch with friends and family, and to communicate and collaborate at work. With live chat functionality also prominent across e-commerce, live streaming, and e-learning experiences, end users have come to expect (near) instant message receipt and delivery.

Live chat is everywhere. From connecting distributed workers across continents, through providing an efficient customer service channel, to bringing together online communities, chat is central to how we communicate. This demand puts an unusual level of pressure on chat app operators to make sure that every message reaches its destination, every time.