An increasing number of people have been connecting to chat on Twitch.tv using Mibbit. This is just one way to talk with the streamers and other viewers, there is the standard chat on Twitch or a conventional client, but if you’re hosting a lot of chatters it can be a help to have Mibbit on hand too.

To connect you’ll need to know the streamname and have your Twitch.tv account details handy.

Skip to the guide at Twitch support to find out more.

Besides the streams there’s also a bunch of channels on several IRC networks related to gaming on Twitch. Check it out http://search.mibbit.com/search/twitch.tv

Recently we looked through our stats for last year and were amazed at the numbers for the Mibbit IRC network, IRC client, Widget and website:  1.4m unique visitors, 10k peak connections, 3.0bn (yes billion!) IRC messages per month on average.

In response to the continued usage we’ve made performance changes to make loading and operation of the Main Client and Widget just a little bit faster.  These include;

• Moved to Amazon s3 for storage of images and javascript (faster download to you)
• Translation feature upgraded to Google Translate API v2
• Caching recently translated words for quicker response
• Improved Websocket support

As the standard for Websocket progressed to a new draft in December 2011 we updated our client to make sure the best performance was squeezed out of your browser.

Visitor browser usage followed general internet trends with Chrome and Firefox becoming about matched with 35-40% Mibbit users each but Internet Explorer lower than the general trend at around 10%. Interestingly the level of IE6 users visiting Mibbit is down to around 0.2% (ie6 must die!), much less than even the US average of 0.9%.  We guess that’s a reflection of the tech-savvy nature of you all!

Thanks for using Mibbit and happy 2012!