Talkshow – Team videos in non-real-time

Show HN is reserved for the maker to post what they have made [1]. Who posted this if it was not you? Seems like a marketing ploy...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Great job launching! Simple but effective landing page, I look forward to seeing the product evolve.

> I'm flattered that this popped up on HN.

Erm. Who is "middle1" then and why did they post this as "Show HN"?

Congrats!

Something I was looking for that you could work towards adding is a demo video showing how this might be used / what the experience looks like. I know I can sign up for free to try, but I don't even know what I'm signing up for.

That's awesome! A similar landing page would take me 2 days, I'be agonizing over every detail, and the result wouldn't be half as good. Well done!

No certificate / unknown issuer causes big scare page in FF by the way.

Oh and then even if I continue, corporate DNS is blocking you due to "security threat".

I agree, but targeting those kinds of people is fine I think. Most of my colleagues eat lunch together, but many programmers (my direct colleagues) prefer to lunch in front of their computers. This is typical for many more technical people I think.

In contrast, the other day when I went over to our marketing department I walked in on them practicing the dance moves of some Elvis video together.

I am not saying that either is better, I am just saying that these differences exist and that is fine.

> Also text is searchable where video is not.

Transcripts could help there.

Text is also universally accessible, including for people with disabilities (e.g. deaf, blind, and for the recording side, people with speech impediments).

There's another product, can't remember it's name at the moment, with similar concept - however they also highlight screen capturing. Perhaps in the case of those who are more introverted or shy, or not feeling confident being on camera, can simply be doing a screen capture of the product - and then a voice over to share what was done, challenges, faced, etc.

You can type a message and not work at the same time, or you can record yourself whilst writing code / doing other tasks as ideas come alive as you speak. I think it's beneficial. I guess it depends on who is using it and how. There's always that one person who hates any tools the company provides to attempt to aide productivity.

This was my initial reaction - it feels a little bit like the option to send short voice messages via iMessage on iPhone, rather than typing. I've never used that feature because it doesn't seem to offer the same convenience factors that text messages offer - especially the ability to compose and consume them in any environment, irrespective of noise (or quiet), companions, and location. Kind of one step forwards, two steps back.

None of this is insurmountable, but I wonder if it will cause inertia in experimentation and uptake?

Good luck, either way - love the initiative the founder has shown. :)

Not enough to be the _main_ mode of communication, but definitely an important part of my team’s remote communications. I run www.gradientmetrics.com, and we’re a (very small) distributed team. We often do screencasts with voiceovers to show how we’re thinking of implementing something, what we think the outline of the deliverable should be, etc., etc. This can be _a lot_ easier to do with a video screencast than it is to type out. We typically do this either with a QuickTime screencast or with the person recording a solo Zoom conference with screen share, and uploading to Vimeo. If there was something that cut that workflow down and had some other features, we’d consider it.

Agreed about "main mode of communication", but training and onboarding come to mind as strong use cases. (shrug)

Like you I would never think of using this but then I asked my kids and they looked at me quite as a benevolent advanced alien race might look down upon us: there there old man, no wonder your world is so tedious...no one writes their ideas down anymore...video, poor soul, is the only way we do things now.

I suppose I did something long ago when my parents told me to write home and I said they could use my PC and modem and use compuserve.

Sigh.

I know exactly the sort of person who would send me a video instead of a text message, and I am glad that (right now) they can't.

I have never seen a person do such a thing on Slack.

"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software."

I believe what I really want is this to be a feature of Slack. Or an integrated 3rd party product.

Zulip has the only sane threading model among chat clients. Call it a topic rather than a title, but it absolutely should be required IMO.

Re Job title - I think this is actually a great idea to filter out tire kickers. Obviously you can just fake it, but email plus job title is a pretty powerful combo.

So do Slack threads with videos in them.

Or a #standup channel where people send in videos, that's what we do.

Hi Tom, nope you've pretty much got the gist of the MVP feature set right there.

This V1 allows you to set up channels, post threads and hierarchical comments, all with (or without) videos attached that you can record through your browser or phone. There's also a "play all" button that allows you to sit back and watch all videos in a thread in succession.

Discussion was an obvious place to start but I'll be looking into other areas next. For example presentation / persuasion - how do you present a deck and convince a remote team in non-real-time? Just blasting an email with an attachment never gets the point across properly.

Hope this sort of explains where my head is at!

I think the medium, that you're supposed to be using video by default rather than text by default, would encourage a team or company to start recording more and tapping at the keyboard less.

I'd compare it to the premise in The Expanse books where there's almost always a light delay for communication so people record video messages by default. When they are on a ship together then they default to audio only. Text is possible in both cases but its bandwidth saving feature isn't required. Now we don't need to save bandwidth anymore perhaps video makes more sense.

Also, if you are a remote worker then playing videos isn't going to annoy an open office full of collegues.

I agree, it's pretty high up on my list of post-launch things to improve.

This is a perfect example of a comment that undervalues simplicity and ease of use (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 is another one).

This comment breaks the site guidelines, first by crossing into personal attack (please don't!), and also arguably by breaking this one:

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

There’s also... just sending video files back and forth via SMS, Slack, Email, Facebook, Google Photos, or shared iCloud albums.

But this service is free so that’s a big plus to just give it the old “try”!