I'm seeing more uses of programs like Shoutbox where it's an instant chat with no registration or sign up and allows for instant contact among visitors to that page. Do you see this has a positive or negative enhancement to a website?

It depends on the nature of your site.

A site that tries to sell products or services should jump at any chance to communicate with its customers. Phone and email remain the most popular channels of communication, but imagine a visitor evaluates your product offering, but the content doesn't answer all of his or her questions. If you offer chat on that page, you get another shot at making the sale. Chat can also double up as a survey tool: you'll quickly learn what content is missing on what pages that could contribute to making the sale there and then.

We tried it for a while on ours.. It used up a lot of bandwidth and most of the posts were utterly juvenile. The occasional interesting item was lost very quickly, due to the transient nature of a shout box.

We got rid of it, and added a 'general chitchat' forum to our main board, where people can post drivel about the weather or what they had for breakfast.

I've definitely seen them, and my first impression of them was that they were probably something for the Twitter demographic... Do you think that's accurate?

Is it particularly effective when you can reply in real time to the shouts?

Yes that sounds about right Taggart. On a website promoting something, I guess a shoutbox might be useful, to answer customer queries in real time, but that would be on the assumption that you have someone manning it 24/7.

Stuff in the shoutbox disappears off the page pretty quick. Not gettting an answer when they ask one in real time, would do more harm than good to your business. People will assume if the service is there, that someone will be at the other end no matter what time it is.

Hm. Point well taken.

We offer the ability to customers to chat with us on the site, but this is tricky, as we do sleep (from time to time).

Although, it is not that hard to create a script that is only active during working hours and checks if any of the operators is away from their computer. During downtime, it would simply deactivate the shoutbox or chat functionality.

I have to say, shoutboxes have increasingly fewer uses, considering how technology has caught up. It would probably be better to integrate Twitter into your site and allowing people to communicate with you on twitter straight from the site.

We are actually creating something just like that for a client who uses Google Wave intensively. People can wave with staff straight from the site.