Slack vs. HipChat – The Chat Wars
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
We've seen this already once with messaging systems. Remember AOL, MSN Messenger, ICQ, etc? Now, it's no better, just that the actor's names are different. Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Wechat, Line.
Do we really want this to happen all over again? I certainly can see the appeal of a system like Slack. After all, we used it ourselves for a while until we decided that we didn't want the vendor lock-in, and instead started developing out own, open source system that implements lots of what Slack is, but that can be self-hosted by anyone.
I would love to see the makers of these kinds of applications to create some kind of standard around these systems.
Honestly at this point any open source chat/IM system not building on xmpp or irc would need a pretty good reason why not
Originally we tried to build something on top of either IRC or XMPP. But, it turns out that a system like Potato (or Slack, if you like) is less a messaging system and more like email, or a wiki.
Messages are persistent, searchable, and editable. You can attach files to messages, and for some kinds of messages you can even have interactions like votes. None of this is part of IRC which is designed to be a messaging system where a message is sent, and after that it really doesn't exist anymore (other than in the scrollback of the users who happened to be in the channel when the message was sent).
When testing Slack, I used to be really frustrated about their horrible IRC support. I still am, but I now understand why they don't give it much attention. It's really not compatible with how these systems work.
I'm definitely not against IRC. I'm always on our Potato channel but I'm also on IRC. After all, I wouldn't want to leave #lisp or #emacs.
As for XMPP, it suffers from many of the same issues as IRC. However, it does have an extension mechanism that could be used to support features such as persistence but as far as I know there is no standard for this, which means such standard has to be agreed upon, which is what I called for in the last message.