Xat is releasing a new limited holiday power called Independence. With it, and its included 14 smiles (see below), users will be able to celebrate the up and coming 4th of July holiday.
The going rate in the store, when it becomes available, appears to be 400 xats.
Included smileys:
We’ve prepared a new contest (one of our biggest to date) and are inviting everyone to participate. Up for grabs are 40 rare powers that will be divided between all the winners (see all the details here).
This morning Xat revealed a new power called Flag.
Flag simply allows you to add flag icon to your avatar (waving or still) or single/multiple flags to your nick. This new power supports over 180 country variations and been released just days ahead of the 2010 World Cup (that’s soccer!).
To make the Xat flag use (flag) or (flag#). To make a country flag use (flag#wus) for the animated usa flag. If you’d like to make a still or fixed version add a “1″ between the “w” and country abbreviation as in (flag#w1us).
Although we’re not sure where Xat got their inspiration for this new power, we have been promoting Google’s Word Cup power on both our Xatworld and Mundoxat homepages for some time. Congrat’s to Google for the great idea!
We imagine that after the World Cup people will still find it useful as a nationality power; something that I think many people have been waiting for. 
It seems that our original guess on what Xat’s new Gline power may be a definite possibility. The image below was posted to the Mundoxat.com forum and presumably it came from the Help chat.
Although it looks like an obvious fake, it did get our wheels turning and once again we turned to Google.com to see what we could find. I’ll paraphrase from a Wiki article on G-line:
“…A G-line or global kill is a global network ban applied to a user.
Whenever a G-lined person attempts to connect to the network, either the services or the daemon will automatically disconnect the client, often displaying a message explaining the “reasoning” behind the ban.
G-lines are normally applied to a user who continues to abuse the network by connecting to a different server. G-lines are often regarded as an extreme measure, only to be used in cases of repeated abuse when extensive attempts have been made to reason with the offending user. Therefore, especially on larger networks, often only very high ranking global operators are permitted to set them.
G-lines are typically set as *@IP or *@host, with the first being the better option. G-lines do still wait for an ident response from the connecting user but immediately close the socket once the user’s IP is compared to the G-line list and a match is found…”
It might be a bit too techy but in short, Gline is looking like it may be a banning feature of some sorts. Maybe a more extreme extension of Stricter banning or, if one reads between the lines and looks at it in more general terms, maybe a way to have more precise banning control over your own chat. We still don’t know for sure
What is Xat’s new Gline power? Well.. although we aren’t sure we know that most of you, like us, can appreciate good old fashion speculation.
We’ve decided to turn our attention to our good old friend URBAN DICTIONARY and have come up with the following:
A quick read over options 1, 2 and 3 leaves us feeling pretty confident with only one option (hint: clearly it isn’t option three). We feel that Gline MAY have something to do with banning a troublesome user across more than one chat. Have you ever had to deal with someone so bad, obnoxious or otherwise that you’ve had to ban them from each of your chats, one-by-one? We have and it’s not fun! Could Gline possibly make it easier to do just that? :S Again, we aren’t sure.
We’ll just wait and see what Xat has in store for us
Off topic: Has everyone had a chance to either view or vote for Google’s World Cup Flag power?
We’ve just finished up and are ready to debut our new, user suggested (thanks DontDenyYourLove!), Xat Kiss generator.
With it we hope that everyone will more thoroughly understand how Xat kisses work, what some of the kiss options are, and just how cool they really can be. We also see this Xat Kiss generator as a good tool for experimenting with pull, bugs, and globe type kisses to see which Xat smileys are currently functioning and which aren’t. In our testing, we’ve concluded that IF it doesn’t show up on the Xat kiss generator, it will not show up in a chatbox (see below).
We’ve all seen these spaces before…
Turns out that if you choose to send a Kiss to someone and choose a smiley that isn’t visible, you get this (someone please correct me if I’m wrong)…
Using the Kiss generator you could check firsthand, before purchasing a kiss, if your particular smiley choice was working or not. Good? We hope so!
Special thanks to DontDenyYourLove for the idea (submitted to us via the Xatworld Idea Factory page). He will be getting a $10 Ultimate game card code for helping out.
Today Xat announced that the next power will be the SILLY power. With little to go on right now, it *looks* to be a Smiley power.
Here are some (all?) of the SILLY smileys:
(bonk)
(burp)
(crazy2)
(dopey)
(impact)
(irked)
(itchy)
(mischief2)
(silly)
(nose)
(raspberry)
(rolleye)
(spit)
(string)
Those who already have the power can go test it out on the Xatworld.com xat_test chat.
Credit goes to Hean for getting us the screenshots and the list of Smileys. Thanks Hean!
Sometime last night, Xat passed along another one of their cryptic messages. This one had to do with Tickle; Xat power (81). It read as follows:
“…When someone clicks on you, you will be notified in a new user list…”
Puzzled, we headed straight for the Xatworld xat_test chat and with HEAN’S help (thank you Hean!), and a few users in Xat’s own xat_test chat, we were able to gather the following information.
What Tickle does:
The new Tickle power activates a new user list (denoted by a white triangle) to the right of the traditional VISITORS and FRIENDS tabs. When another user, regardless of where they are on Xat, clicks on your nick, that triangle changes to green; alerting you to the fact that “someone” has clicked your nick. Want to know who would dare do such a thing? Easy, just click the green triangle and you will gain access to a new user list showing exactly who and/or how many people have clicked on your nick. That’s it!
Screenshots:
No news on pricing, availability, or when it might be released.
Update 1: Thanks ACK, Ziggy… typo corrected!
Update 2: Tickle eventually to be free for those that have activated ACCOUNT LOCKING
Xat has just added a new security feature that more effectively protects your account against potential phishing.
How it works
Users that only access their Xat accounts from home or from one specific computer, can now activate “account locking”. This will restrict access to your Xat account to only the one computer that has initiated the lock. If you were to move house or change internet providers you would first have to turn off locking beforehand.
IMPORTANT: xat staff will never ask you to turn off account locking. If anyone asks you to turn off account locking they are trying to access your account and steal your stuff..
“We are here at Xatworld.com, where we’ve secretly replaced the fine Radio IP search box that users usually use, with a newer version. Let’s see if anyone can tell the difference!”
Here’s a hint
