Try our app (Flowdock, the team messenger) | Hacker News Reader

Try our app (Flowdock, the team messenger)

blog.nodeta.fi

38 pointsenra33 comments

I started using it this morning. After my session auto-expired, I can no longer log back in. It seemed useful until that happened, but lack of reliability is a deal-breaker.

This is beyond awesome! Perfect interface, perfect mix of Yammer and IRC and data importing, perfect across the board.

Are you guys going to have a Yammer import feature? If you could import all our past messages from Yammer into that right-hand column then our team would switch in a tenth of a second flat.

Hi! Thanks for the feedback. We're sure planning to make the conversion as easy as possible, and Yammer import is on top of our list. We will announce new features in our blog and on Twitter, stay tuned. :)

Cool, looking forward to it! Consider yourself followed :)

I'm also super impressed. You could have gone in any number of crazy directions but you kept it simple (dashboard, incoming, searches). I love it. It's like Campfire on steroids.

Personal feature request: preview youtube URLs, images, and tweets pasted into the chat area. Less important: let people select a range of chat messages and tag en-masse so they show up together in a search.

Those are both awesome suggestions that I enthusiastically second. Especially the paste-preview thing, that's practically a must-have.

"its what google wave should have been"?

i would be differentiating yourself from wave as much as possible... you don't want to be competing with google when wave gets released sooner or later.

(Actually Wave was announced and released to beta while we were developing Flowdock so it's was really interesting for us.)

Yeah, it's true that we should differentiate ourselves from Wave as much as possible, but the comment "It's what Google Wave should have been", means that for some people Flowdock is what they expected or wanted from Wave.

The problem I see with Wave is that it's trying to be everything for everyone, which is a really ambitious goal. With Flowdock we just want to provide tools for teams that work constantly and intensively together.

don't underestimate google. it's probably safe to assume they know exactly what they are doing.

This looks really good. What would make it great is if the api allowed information to go in both directions. That is, it looks like right now I can have external information listed and then talked about with Flowdock. But!, can I then have the flowdock discussions sent back to the external source if said source accepts it? (For example, I have a workflow system where an external source lists current workflows, but I need all the discussion about those workflows sent back to the source system in some form)

App icons looks a little aliased in Chrome running in Ubuntu: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/121630/flowdock_raw.png

edit: Oh, and how much time does it take for a "session to expire"? Mine expired in 5 minutes of innactivity or so...kind of annoying if you're waiting for a team mate that went to the bathroom for example.

Thanks, we're working on the icons.

Sessions do not actually expire anytime soon - we just deployed a bugfix release and had to restart the backend. We'll make the deployment experience a bit smoother soon. :)

I'm guessing that you are doing something right now since I just get a "500 Internal Server Error" every time I try to go to the flow.

Looks good, playing with it with one of my teams. I set it up in fluid, but when I try and login via fluid, it seems to send me into my default browser to open the page that lets me select which flow I want to use.

One feature that would be nice is not matching search on twitter streams... ie +term1 -term2, would help with signal to noise ratio for what would be interesting for my teams.

This is a problem with Fluid's default settings. You can fix it by going to Preferences -> Advanced -> Add a new pattern: flowdock.com

We'll try to document this process a bit better.

Tried to signup .. Got 500 Internal Server Error. :(

I'll bet you have NoScript switched on?

I don't. I'm just using a vanilla Chrome install on Ubuntu. I do have Flash installed, don't see why that would matter in this case, though.

Got the same thing using Chrome and FF on Ubuntu.

I do not have "No Script".

I did submit a User Voice suggestion about it.

From @flowdock on twitter: "We need to change our system setup a bit to handle the load. We'll tweet when we're done..."

We had a surprisingly sticky problem and were forced to do a lengthy data migration. The service is now up.

Looks interesting, will certainly check it out. One of the weaknesses of other project tracking tools for Victus Media has been the speed at which we change priorities. Continual user feedback helps us manage where we want to go long term, versus what we hack out tonight.

Would appreciate any tools that change as fast as we do, while keeping th big picture highlighted

Haven't used the app yet, but one thing I would suggest is re-doing your voiceover on your very prominent product demo video and making cuts between demoing key features. I can understand your accent just fine (although it couldn't hurt to have someone with a very neutral english accent do the voiceover) but the quality of the audio is really poor.

Absolutely. The audio is so quiet in your voiceover that even max volume on my laptop speakers and Youtube slider I can't understand a word you're saying. You need to normalize the volume level using any sound editor, and better yet, use a good mic.

If we can't understand what you're saying, how likely are we to use your product?

Thanks for pointing this out. Apparently making screencasts is not really our strongest asset. We try to make a better one later.

I recommend a test team that people can join.

You'll have to think of a way to prevent it from becoming a wasteland of "asdlkfjsakj" posts though.

Looks good!

I would really appreciate that, because I had no clue what organization to enter in the sign up form (will I be able to change it later? can I sign up again for another organization with the same email?). Moreover, I didn't understand how should one use this application within the 3 minutes I invested :)

Loved it when I tried it this morning, but the [apparent] overload of the servers led to my team dismissing it without a second thought.

nice work guys...interesting to see a different take on the Flow as a team collaboration medium. Also, Love the flow based puns like "Flowser". At Shareflow we call the creator of the flow the "Flowner".

http://zenbe.com/shareflow

Thanks, nice job with Shareflow as well.

After we decided with the name it was quite funny how many 'flow' products were out there :)

Is it me or does the nodeta image on the left look like a bong at first sight?

You've probably seen too many bongs. I didn't make the connection.

Looked like ordinary chemist's flasks to me.

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