So this is cool. Tired of paying $50 a month for Intercom, the service that allows people to answer questions and chat with visitors to their site, Tom Critchlow decided to see if he could hack a better way.
And he did! Using HTML and CSS he replaced Intercom with … Facebook Messenger. Now his site, the digital art gallery Fiercely Curious has a free chat function with an interface everyone is familiar with.
In an interview via Facebook Messenger over the Fiercely Curious site, Critchlow said it’s not a perfect fix since it only works for people who have Facebook and who are logged in (so, everyone?) but that he was happy with it for his needs.
“It’s been fun playing around with it,” he wrote. “In the long run I’d be surprised if Facebook didn’t come out with a more robust official version of this.”
Critchlow made the code available on GitHub for everyone to use.
“I had a few people asking how I did it so I wanted to share the code,” Critchlow wrote in a post. “It’s nothing complicated and I’m sure there are more efficient ways of presenting this so I hope by sharing it we can improve the experience!”
Not bad, Tom!