The concept of chatting may not be new these days, but it’s still one of the best ways to connect with others and share information. If you are a webmaster for a popular website, there is no reason not to offer your readers the chance to chat with you once in a while. Besides, you can always provide you readers with the tools and let them go from there.

Social chatting is quite popular these days. That’s essentially chatting for Twitter and Facebook users. There are many tools that can add such functionality to your website. The nice thing about social chat websites is that they make it so easy to integrate chat rooms into any site. They are easy to set up too.

Those of you interested in adding chat functionality to your website should check these 5 social chat services out:

Tinychat: a light-weight and fun chat platform that lets your visitors connect with you using their social credentials. Supports video chats too.

Nurph: a cool social chat service that lets you start a chat room on Twitter. It allows you to add it to your website and share your chat room with the world. Takes just a couple of minutes to set up.

Donut Chat: a freemium service that can be used to set up chat rooms easily. If you are willing to pay a bit, you can host your chat rooms at a URL of your own choosing. Supports media sharing and third-party app integration too.

Skysa: adds a social bar to your website. Offers you the chance to enhance its functionality by adding more apps. You can use it to connect with your readers and even give them the tools to promote your pages.

Twalkin: a very innovative service that lets you have a voice chat or two with your followers on Twitter. If you are tired of typing, this service is for you.

Chatting with your readers is a great way to build a more solid community around your website. The above services are mostly free and let you connect with your visitors in a convenient fashion.

Please feel free to add your suggestions in the comment section.

There are plenty of people who spend hours of their time on Twitter and Facebook on a daily basis. Add to that hundreds of useful tools that are available for these networks, and you may end up spending all your days on these sites. There are plenty of Twitter tools that can help you get the most out of this social network. Some can help you increase your followers while some others can keep track of your favorite topic. You are never going to be out of options.

If you are struggling to feed your Twitter addiction, here are 5 tools that could help:

Twalkin: a very cool service that lets you connect and start talking with your Twitter friends. If you want to have a private chat with your friends or announce something to a selection of your followers, Twalkin is must try.

Tweeterview: a great tool to interview people on Twitter with and watch other people’s interviews. Helps keep things organized while you interview other people.

Klout: an all powerful tool that dissects your profile and lets you know whether you are making a difference on Twitter. It can show you what areas you need to work on to take your Twitter to the next level.

jotabl: gives you an easy way to add a Twitter shout-box to your website. Just add it to your website and have your visitors connect with you and tweet right from your site.

Tweetwally: Tweetwally gives you an easy way to create a Twitter wall based on a hash-tag, user-name, or keywords. Sign in, and you can even share your wall with others.

There are plenty more tools around for Twitter. Not every tool is going to be useful for your situation, but the above tools do you give you the chance to connect more effectively with your visitors and boost your presence on Twitter.

Unless you have been completely ignoring what’s going on in the social media, you have probably heard of AllTop and PopURL. These are great places that you can find new RSS feeds and top blogs about almost any topic. Trying to clone such services is not as easy as it looks, but you can always start your own site sharing feeds that matter to you the most. If you are a blogger or a niche portal owner, you can use such feature to provide more value to your visitors. Thanks to Aggregator theme for WordPress, you can start sharing your favorite feeds with the world without spending too much money.

Aggregator theme is a widget based theme. Users can add all kinds of feeds and as many of them as they prefer. While you don’t want to add too many feeds to this theme, it should work for most people. You can add video, blog, and photo feeds to your widgets. So you have the opportunity to build a content heavy Aggregator without doing too much.

Credit: Templatic

Aggregator is pretty easy to use and customize. It’s almost free too. You don’t want to build your business around it, but it can give you visitors an additional tool to keep up with feeds that you have found useful. It’s like having your own personal AllTop.

Everybody who has tried iPad in the past is familiar with its lacking multi-tasking capability. If you want to be on Twitter and keep an eye on your Facebook updates on your iPad, you are going to have to keep opening and closing apps. That’s where Sociable for iPad comes into play. It’s a social media center for your iPad, giving users the opportunity to keep track of developments on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, and Flickr.

Sociable is really 6 apps fit into one. For starters, it enables users to read and update their Facebook status on iPad. Writing on walls and commenting on photos is possible too.

Sociable supports Twitter too. It lets iPad owners manage multiple Twitter accounts, post tweets, retweet, and even view tweets on a map. Support for Digg, Flickr, and Reddit is nice to have too.

Those of you who are involved in more than just one community are going to love this app. Sure, you could have the same capabilities if iPad supported multi-tasking, but that is not happening in the near future. Besides, Apple’s definition of multi-tasking is very different from ours. With Sociable, you won’t have to worry about that.

There is no question that Google Reader is the best feed reader around today. It offers a ton of features and makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs. That does not mean there are other solutions out there for RSS junkies. Favit is an exciting service that brings a more social aspect to your reading experience. The service connects you with your friends and lets you share connect with them and discover what their likes too.

Favit feels like a hybrid Twitter/RSS-reader. It not only gives you all the tools you need to follow your favorite blog, share your top stories, and get in touch with friends, it keeps track of your activities too. Your stream shows your followers what you have been doing, where you have left comment, and what items you have shared.

What’s nice about Favit is the data it collects on how its users interact with articles and other people. That information could come handy when you are ready to expand your network or just want to do a quick research. It’s also nice to be able to share items publicly and in private.

Favit is not going to replace Twitter or Google Reader for me. But it’s still a nice service to consider using if you are tired of Google Reader. The interface still needs a bit of work, but Favit has a great potential.

Those of you who have been blogging for a while know the importance of using visuals to get your point across in your posts. Spicynodes is a cool visualizer that lets you demonstrate what you have in mind to your readers in a more dynamic fashion. All you have to do is break down your thoughts and put it all in nodes.

Spicynodes is free to sign up for and quite easy to work. Once you have developed an outline or have the concept you want to demonstrate to others broken down, you can use this service to present your ideas in a more dynamic fashion. You can add and customize nodes easily. You can change the style of your nodemap easily.

Of course, if you are willing to pay for this service, there are plenty of other things you can do with your nodemaps, including integrating them into your very own website and taking advantage of the API behind this service. Spicynodes is overall a pretty easy tool and very effective for those who want to communicate with the world in a more visual way (catch a demo here).

The first step to get involved in social media is by starting your very own blog. Everybody has something to share with the world (not talking about your lunch adventures though). After all, you don’t want to participate on Twitter and Facebook without having a plan .When you have a blog, you can use your social profiles to drive traffic to your blog and solidify your community.

Every blogger would tell you that getting people to comment on posts can be challenging. Top bloggers have mastered this art. Those bloggers who do not get a lot of traffic on their website, will have a tough time getting people to participate. The best way to do it is by making it easy for visitors to comment on each post, add their own content, and rate what others have to say. That’s where Intense Debate comes in. It’s a powerful comment management system by the people behind WordPress that turns your comment system into a powerful community tool for your readers.

Intense Debate is very easy to install and adds a whole other dimension to your blog. It lets your visitors to comment on your blog by using their Twitter, Facebook, or Intense Debate account. Of course, they can do it the good old way (with a name and URL). Since Intense Debate is compatible with Akismet, you can deal with spam comments more effectively as well.

Intense Debate has a bunch of plugins that you can activate to take your comment section to the next level. For instance, you can enable video comments or give users the ability to add images or YouTube videos in their comments. All of that is offered to you for free.

If you are an aspiring blogger who want to take your blog to the next level and get your reader more involved, you can’t go wrong with Intense Debate.

Apple iPhone may be based on a closed system, but it has a huge fan base. Lots of people have bought into iPhone’s promise and have gotten on board with the platform. Not everyone uses the same types of apps on their devices. That’s why sharing your lists with others and looking at their list can be a useful way to provide value. Thanks to AppsFire, we all can share our favorite apps with the world and help others discover new apps.

The service is quite easy to get to work. All you have to do is download AppsFire’s iPhone application and import your apps. You can then share them with the world. It’s also possible to go over what others have had to share on their pages as well. Best of all, you can send a link to your very own apps page from Facebook or Twitter.

iTunes has a ton of applications. Finding the best apps is not always easy. There are so many copycats out there and not too many app review sites offer a detailed comparison of these apps. AppsFire taps into the power of community to provide its users a better shot at finding top iPhone apps.

AppsFire is impressive in many ways. It shows how entrepreneurs can use the power of community to offer better, more sophisticated products to their customers. A great case study for aspiring entrepreneurs.

It is quite funny how many people claim to be social media experts these days. You can’t call yourself an expert when your industry is changing by the day. One might know a lot about Twitter or Facebook, but that’s different than being an “experts.” If you want to among the top players in your industry, you need to stay 0n the top of what goes on in your industry at all times. There are plenty of blogs and forums that one can keep track of to learn new things, come up with new ideas, and even find partners to work with in the future.

Google Reader is a nice feed reader, but sometimes you need a feed reader that does more than just organizing your feeds. The Early Edition is an innovative feed reader for iPad that not only fetches the latest posts from your favorite RSS feeds, it also turns them into a virtual newspaper. So instead of you having to go through a list of feeds, you can see a snapshot of what’s going on in your world.

The Early Edition is pretty easy to work with. All you have to do is add your favorite feeds to it, and it does the rest for you. It may not have fancy features that you see in top feed readers such as Google Reader. But it does make it much easier to read your feeds like a newspaper. Depending on the number of feeds that you add to this app, you are going to get more pages in your newspaper. The slider at the bottom enables you to skip pages and go through your feeds more conveniently.

The app allows you to share your favorite stories via e-mail or send them to instapaper. It’s also possible to copy your favorite links. You can add forums and even Twitter streams to your feed reader. As long as you have an RSS feed, The Early Edition can read it.

What I like about the app is its design. It makes it so easy for me to catch up with the latest news in my industry quickly in the middle of the day or at the end of each night. It may not replace your Google Reader, but it can be very useful during those busy days at the office.

Facebook has been on a mission to challenge Google and go beyond what many thought impossible in generating more traffic than any other web property on the Internet. With its latest plugins, Facebook may be well on its way. Facebook’s social plugins bring a whole new dimension to promoting content on Facebook. In just a matter of few days, thousands of websites have already implemented Facebook social plugins. Considering that implementing these tools takes only a few minutes, there is no reason not to try.

Facebook Like Button is already getting a lot of love from bloggers. It gives Facebook users an easy way to give some love to articles that they like the most. For bloggers, it’s a win win situation. The plugin brings Facebook to their community and helps spread the word around their top blog posts. The Recommendations plugin is another exciting tool that makes it easier for your Facebook visitors to find out about your top posts.

You can obviously go beyond these simple tools and fully integrate Facebook into your website by allowing people to log on to your site and comment using their Facebook accounts. Many top blogs and publishers are already trying that (CNN comes to mind).

It is also possible to show your visitors what other Facebook users have been doing on your website (that could encourage others to do the same things others have been doing). What’s nice about all these tools is how easy one can implement them. You don’t have to be a programming genius or web developer to do it. Is Facebook right for your website? You never know unless you try.