Screen sharing in Slack, made interactive via Screenhero acquisition (YC W13)
slackhq.com
slackhq.com
Yet, no one notices when business opportunity stares them in the face.
Go and duplicate screenhero. It's not that hard (Screenhero was written by 4 devs and 1 designer). They did YC in winter 2013 and got acquired by Slack in Jan 20015, so it's less than 2 years.
You have a validated product that many people love and are willing to pay for and enough of a "outside of Slack" market to sustain a small company.
On launch you'll get free PR just by announcing "Screenhero alternative".
And if you do a good job, it's likely that Atlassian (or some other Slack competitor) will want to acquire you for a tidy sum.
Lot's of the hard code has been written for you (libraries for stun firewall traversal, vp8 for the video codec). You need to write a simple backend for matching people and 2 desktop apps (mac and windows).
It's not easy but it's also not a problem that requires breaking new ground, just solid engineering.
What we get instead are pleas to Slack to not kill stand-alone Screenhero and bemoaning that someone didn't write OSS (aka free) clone.
Also, “exact replacement for killed product” is a realy good advertising pitch to differentiate from those thousand other versions. It worked for The Old Reader, and later Feedly, when Google Reader was killed.
Note that by the time of Slack acquisition Screenhero was approaching v2.0, they had product out far longer than that. So it's not unreasonable to say you could do a v1 of similar product in a year.
Both idea and execution are hard. Cloning existing idea removes one hard part, therefore increasing the chances of success. Look at Excel, Word or Baidu or Sina Weibo.
As to "thousands of other versions of this": you would have to point to at least one. It's hard to argue against imaginary products.
Based on this thread for many people Screenhero has no acceptable substitute.
I understand they're slightly different from one another, and I suppose its possible all the commenters here went through each and every one of these options and found nothing useable but it seems unlikely to me, and similarly unlikely the +1 one would make in this pool would be any sort of revolutionary "game changer" VCs would mob onto. The space seems well-established or dare I say it "saturated".
You're right that the idea is the easy part. Still, there are a number of TeamViewer clones, ranging from terrible to pretty good. They may not have the same brand recognition but TeamViewer is quite expensive and not everyone is willing to pay top dollar.
If the company which builds an excellent solution does not get acquired they will learn the meaning of the word "hell on earth": customer acquisition baby. Customer acquisition is not easy.
Of course, customer acquisition is easier if your product does not suck - but not so much.
I'm not disputing that customer acquisition is hard but that's exactly why cloning Screenhero is better than doing any random idea.
Also, you would have to list a couple of those "excellent applications that die very fast" before I just take your word for it. Personally I see many not so great applications that do decent business and have never seen an excellent application that died.
Really? Lots of companies with better/faster/cheaper products go under... I feel like most do. Very few products are so good that they sell themselves.
They made a useful app and probably would have at least a multi-million dollar business, eventually.
As it happens, that was worth much more to Slack so they probably got a good immediate payday and stock in very promising company.
For 2 years of work, I would say that's a great success.
Most of the apps listed are for video conferencing and "simple screen sharing".
That's not what Screenhero does.
Screenhero is for collaborating with other people on arbitrary applications.
I would be ready to pay $3/month for screenhero standalone or a pay-per-use. I'm not interested in Slack, the use cases are clearly different.
I think Slack missed or rather killed an opportunity here, they could have kept Screenhero (and use it to upsell Slack) and also integrated it in Slack. Not only that but it took them over 2 years to make this integration and in the meantime Screenhero remained invite-only.
Screenhero was the best way for me to remotely support my parents computers. I know there are a thousand tools out there for this, but Screenhero was so incredibly simple that it beat out everything else.
I still need their help with they accidentally disconnect from the internet. I would like to have a conversation with the companies who put an unlabeled physical (or key combo) wifi power switches on laptops intended for home use. It's my first troubleshooting step now when family members on laptops have connection issues.
More info: https://support.discordapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/11500098275...
The non-email world is fragmented. Signal? Facebook? Snapchat? Whatsapp? None have achieved ubiquity and their audience is constantly churning over to the next fad platform. Facebook has the best shot and there's still a huge part of the population that doesn't want their FB life to intersect with their work life.
Email is the lowest common denominator. The fact that "younger generations" (as if every 3 years is a "new generation"?) choose a different platform only reinforces the value of email as the only thing that everyone can agree on.
[0]: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/903663357210841088?lang=en
Think of a group text with random emails and etc and it simply raises up a slack with all the parties invited and owned by the creator - then you can choose to dissolve or make perm the slack as needed...
Right now I'm using the slack-integrated "ScreenHero", and it's really laggy. This is super disappointing, and painful to use. It's actually making the mouse pointer of the person sharing lag for them.
Slack: please keep the stand-alone ScreenHero until you make the integrated one have the same performance.
> If you currently use Screenhero, you’ll need to migrate your team to Slack before December 1st, 2017. At that point, the stand-alone Screenhero app will no longer work — but you can enjoy the same features in Slack.
Sounds like they already have their plans set in stone.
Perhaps management didn't know how much of a downgrade this was.
Hopefully Slack's acquisition helps/helped them with those apparent scaling issues.
I don't know about anyone else but this phrase is really starting to annoy me. It's overly used, and the word "butter" in my mind is closer to "greasy", like "don't touch it with your finger because it'll get slimy and you'll have to wash your hands". Can't you just say "smooth" or "without any perceptible lag"?
EDIT: Seriously, this doesn't bug anyone else?
Psalm 55:21 King James Version (KJV)
21. The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart: his words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords.
there was also a 'Project Butter' designed to make Android 'Buttery Smooth' a few years back - I think the high level of application of this idiom to video rendering specifically took hold at that point..
https://trends.google.la/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=s...
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=smooth+as+butt...
Given the shitty performance of the Slack desktop client (which basically only does IRC with gifs and emoji), I'm not too confident in their ability to improve the performance of, well, anything.
It's a native desktop client for Slack, Skype, Slack, Facebook, etc. It's only 4 MB, it has minimal CPU usage, and it can handle hundreds of thousands of messages without lag.
Also, given that it's not open source, I can't trust it with my private Slack teams. I would seriously consider making the source open. You can still charge for it (and I'd love to pay for it!), but I need assurance that it's not doing anything untoward. Perhaps a Patreon level that includes source code access?
I'm not happy about it, but there's no other way.
It's still a native app, you don't have to always have a web browser running any more.
I don't agree with your WOW example. The browser is downloaded only for authentication, it's not used after that. The actual app is indeed 4 MB, and it has minimal CPU/RAM usage, unlike web browsers and WOW :)
Yes, downloading 50 MB for authentication sucks, but you still get a light native app.
[0]: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201727913-Connect-t...
I'm sure it's all fixed now as the Slack experience itself is robust.
I work for myself and have a large contact list of people who don't know each other who I often pair with or screenshare with. With Slack, there's really no way for me to create the same setup.
I'd need to create a new team called "Adam's Screenhero Contacts", invite all of my contacts (who don't know each other) to be part of this "team" together, and I'd have to foot the bill for the whole team since there's no way for each individual to pay for their own Slack account.
Is there a viable Screenhero alternative out there yet?
It's bittersweet to see them acquired by Slack as a paid only feature, but I'm happy for the team and it seems like a very ideal kind of acquisition where they solve a problem Slack has and wasn't solving well, and then Slack can scale the Screenhero userbase overnight.
Edit: I just tried this feature in Slack with /call then enabling others to edit and it didn't seem to be as smooth as the usual Screenhero experience. I wonder if something was changed in the integration.
I know your hands are tied to some degree about all this, but I'll make a plea regardless.
We use Screenhero regularly. It is the critical tool for enabling remote collaboration which is a big deal for our distributed teams (all of them).
Our corporate firewall blocks Slack. Plenty of us are upset about that, but it's life for us. As of December 1, we can't use Screenhero anymore and this will be pretty disruptive for us.
We'll find some way to deal, but this is disappointing.
I stumbled upon Screenhero, but it was already too late—Slack bought it and it's not possible to create a new account.
What we chose for a few weeks was Appear.in—a simple, painless and reliable tool. However I feel like it's not polished enough, and some of our clients had issues with it, so I kept looking.
Jitsi has been a blast: just install an extension (or no extension if you're on Firefox) and you're ready to go. It's uncluttered, it's reliable and too good to be free to be honest.
Only downside it's that all the URLs are public and since there are no registration involved, there's no admin on each channel.
https://docs.mattermost.com/overview/security.html#hipaa-com...
> Now that Screenhero is fully integrated into Slack, we will be closing Screenhero on December 1st. https://screenhero.com/ for more info!
Have you tried youtube for live streaming? Never tried a private stream, but they certainly know how to scale video.
I hope it's stable. Slack's audio/video conferencing is not exactly... smooth.
In fact, it still boggles my mind that in 2017, conferencing is still in the stone ages when it comes to reliability.
With Slack I often either get a one-way connection (only one party can hear the other) or the call is unable to connect, claiming that "Bob ended the call". Meetings tend to start with five minutes of "Can you hear me? Hello? Testing, testing..." until we either are able to get a connection, or we give up and move to Skype, which isn't perfect, but much more reliable.
Incredibly, it also turns out that if you try calling someone who's already calling you on Slack, you get a busy error! How insane is that? We were both trying to reach each other, both expressing — in terms of UI — the exact same intent, and the app interprets that as a conflict.
There's also some pretty shoddy intergration between the desktop and mobile app. Recently, I tried talking to a colleague, and we went through all of the above insanity, but at one point, as he was calling me, Slack on my phone was ringing, but the desktop app wasn't. Some of these bugs are hard to understand.
My company's go-to solution the last couple of years has been GoToMeeting, which is 99% rock solid, but doesn't integrate well with anything, and doesn't have a good mobile app. The biggest benefits to GTM are the ability to record meetings, and the ability to dial in through a normal phone. The latter feature has saved is a lot of times when one person has been on a bad Internet connection.
I could also screenshare which "kind of" worked, but it was a bit wonky with virtual desktops in xmonad (graphics glitches, but workable)
Haven't tried it under X yet.
Since its impossible to implement something that works across multiple environments hopefully whichever one does the best job of providing this feature also does a decent job of providing every other feature that previously was able to be provided by any app.
It has driven me to use google meet - which seems to be more stable and doesn't bog down my system.
I have even successfully captured a tab to video [0]
0 - https://github.com/cretz/chrome-screen-rec-poc/tree/master/a...
Edit: I should say screen capture, screen sharing is a different deal of course.
Slack, Hangouts, Appear.in all use it and on Mac in particular it seems to use alot of CPU.