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Live streaming has evolved from a novelty to the backbone of modern digital events. When major brands host virtual conferences, product launches, or community gatherings, they're no longer dealing with hundreds of viewers – they're managing tens of thousands of concurrent participants, all expecting to engage in realtime chat. We recently worked with a team building live chat for a major creative software company's annual event.

We’ve all been there: you’re building a chat experience and end up spending way too much time on UI glue - message bubbles, room lists, typing indicators… all before you even get to the good part: real-time logic. So today, we’re launching a set of lightweight, flexible UI components built for React and powered by Ably Chat.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Message Reactions in Ably Chat - a quintessential part of any modern chat experience, now available as a native feature. How message reactions work Each reaction in Ably Chat is defined by a simple string, often a UTF-8 emoji like , but it could also be a tag (:like:) or text (+1). Reactions are aggregated in realtime based on their name.

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

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.