Chat Catcher by Shannon Whitley was one of my favorite WordPress plugins in capturing Twitter messages and beautifully displaying them as blog comments.  There was also a great support module on Drupal.

I had announced earlier this month that Chat Catcher was shutting down due to high upkeep costs and lack of funding.

May 15th 2009, I received a teaser e-mail from Shannon explaining that Chat Catcher is not shutting down and there was more exciting announcements to come soon.

This was great news indeed and I was very curious to see what else was in store. 

Earlier today I recieved a message on Twitter from Shannon.

Ocasta Labs have injected both funds and resources to extend the Chat Catcher team and to accelerate development of the service thus keeping Chat Catcher alive!!  Hooray!

I have been using BackType Connect plugin to replace Chat Catcher but for some reason due to my blog theme, I was not able to make the plugin show the beautiful avatars on Twitter but the replacement plugin still worked nonetheless which doubled my comment count because I still had Chat Catcher on while waiting for the service to shut down.

Now that Chat Catcher is up and running I am going to keep Chat Catcher and also still use BackType connect because its customizable where I can filter out the Twitter messages and keep the other messages like “Blog comments” and “Digg” scans which Chat Catcher doesn’t support.

So in essence both plugins will compliment each other for my blog and I love it!

Thank you Shannon and Good luck with the funding!

P.S – The founder of Backtype Connect - Christopher Golda, was very helpful in reaching out in providing support to me about trying to fix my avatar problem, I was impressed and greatly appreciated his help.

Post from: Social Media Vision

Chat Catcher Plugin Revives With Funding