RowThree has always been about community and discussion. That was our mission statement from day one. A place for relatively like-minded people to come together and shoot the bull on movies, flicks and films. That said, we also didn’t like the idea of a forum; we wanted the discussion to stay focused on the topic at hand and then let the conversation go where it needed to within the comment section. If it strayed off into uncharted territory, so be it; but essentially it stayed within the confines of whatever that particular subject happened to be. We’re still generally in-sync with that notion. However…

We wanted a place where people could sound off immediately on any topic they see fit. A real time commenting section that doesn’t necessarily have to fit within the confines of a particular post. Yet we also didn’t want a separate page readers had to find and skew themselves away from RowThree. So what to do? Well, introducing the RowThree “Lounge”.

In the lower right corner of your screen you’ll notice a little blue bar that reads, “click here to chat!”. So you can do just that. Enter in your screen name and an email address and start chatting away (the email address is only there for Gravatar purposes; we don’t collect that information in any way).

It’s a fairly simple interface for now. We’re working on some ideas to make it a little bit more interactive and integrated better within the aesthetics of RowThree. But for now, it’s functional and working well. Clicking the bar will open up a small pop-up window with a running chat screen and an input field.

Just type something profound, hit enter and voila, your voice will be seen (and heard with the alert sound). The interface will accept basic HTML tags for bold, italics and larger fonts. It apparently does not accept image tags at the moment but that’s something we’re working on a remedy for – along with some other neat ideas. Another small hitch is that for some reason it will not auto-scroll when each message arrives; you’ll have to do that yourself (we’re working on a fix for this). Otherwise, everything seems to work well.

So for now, feel free to sound off about anything you like in there. Ask questions, talk politics, provide feedback, share interesting links, etc. And definitely give us some feedback on this new feature in the comments section of this post. What do you think? Worth keeping around or a stupid gimmick?