You'd love to spend more time in chat rooms? If only it were easier. Multicity doesn't want you to give up on chat yet.

This week, the company launched two products designed to make chatting worth your while. Multicity.com's new In-the-Box technology will bring a chat room right to your E-mail in-box, allowing you to chat without having to navigate to a Web site. The company also introduced an instant translation tool that allows a diverse group of users to communicate in real-time using their native languages.

The free tools are available to Webmasters who wish to incorporate the technology into their own sites, and are in use in several chat rooms on Multicity.com. The free service is supported by advertising; users who want to limit advertising and add more features can pay $84 a year for MultiChat Plus, or $284 for MultiChat Pro.

Chat-in-the-Box
If you don't have a Web site, you can create your own chat room at Multicity and use the In-the-Box feature to E-mail it to your friends. You provide Multicity with some basic demographic information and choose a user name and password. You can make the chat public, or you can choose to limit access with passwords.

Your guests don't even need to sign up with Multicity to participate in your chat room, and they can forward the chat room to others. In fact, if they get bored, they can search for a more interesting chat on the Multicity network--without leaving E-mail. To use the In-the-Box feature, you enter the recipient's E-mail addresses, and they receive a message containing the chat room. It does not arrive in an attachment, and the recipient doesn't have to download anything--Multicity uses a small Java applet that can run inside an E-mail program, says Patrick Hanash, the company's president and chief financial officer. In-the-Box works with "most" E-mail programs, he says, including Microsoft Outlook and Netscape. Users of Web-based E-mail may have to take one extra step and click on a link to view the chat room. Hanash adds that firewalls and certain versions of Lotus Notes may cause problems.

Going Global
The Instant Translation feature can translate between English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish on the fly. Multicity plans to add Korean and Japanese translation next month. You simply type your message in your own language and select a language for translation. The text appears in both your language and the translated version in the chat room. You can also specify which language you'd like to receive your messages in.

I tested Instant Translation in a French chat room and found that it didn't always work as well as advertised. The messages did appear in both languages as promised, but the translations didn't always accurately reflect the peculiar idioms of each language. People often use slang while chatting and don't always pay attention to grammar and spelling. If the Instant Translation tool is unable to translate a word in the original message, it simply leaves that word in place and translates the sentence around it. Some messages left me feeling like I did in ninth grade French class--understanding about half of what my teacher was saying.

The Instant Translation feature will be integrated with Multicity.com's instant messaging, voting booths, and message boards over the next month, according to Hanash. The voting booth and message board features also work with In-the-Box technology.

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