Show HN: Add an always-on video hangout to your Slack channel | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Add an always-on video hangout to your Slack channel

jackfruit.live

52 pointsdrpancake14 comments

I think about this all the time and was sad to see Sqwiggle die -- excited to see this evolve.

A couple quick thoughts:

- What's it like to be in two channels attempting to have a "meeting"? Seems like that will get confusing quickly.

- Consider an idle state where a snapshot is posted every so often (~once/minute) until people switch to an active discussion. That way you can see who's around with way less bandwidth.

Yes it does allow you to open multiple channels at the same time. I don't know how useful that is, but I'd like to see how people actually use it before jumping to my own conclusions.

The idle state is definitely something I'm considering for bandwidth and privacy reasons. Sqwiggle (now defunct) did this quite well. I'm also thinking about adding a way to pixelate or blur your feed while still remaining 'present'.

At first I thought this was going to be a room where it always had everyone's videos and you could see all your remote workers and I was like "...creepy...and no..."

I guess that could be a use case, but it's much simpler than that. Seems pretty neat.

Something like that would be tremendously useful when you're one person who's WFH. It would be nice to take a glance at the office webcam, and see if my coworkers are actually at their desks before pinging them a question - otherwise, I'm not sure if they're about to respond, or busy away from their desk, etc.

Could you imagine using the current feature set to do this? Is there anything missing?

I think you'd have to have a dedicated machine with a camera for this; otherwise, you'd have to ask one of your coworkers to basically be constantly on-camera for you. That's not a limitation of the service, though.

Right, there are a number of tools like that including the (now defunct) Sqwiggle. My goal was to create something simple to fit a few use cases and see what people do with it.

I started building this last night, can't wait to try it out - hopefully I can stop building it :)

This is interesting. Any hint at what the pricing model will be? I'm not seeing anything.

The plan is to keep the current functionality free and add premium features for remote teams in the future.

Now I get why everyone's complaining that Slack is hindering their work ;)

Played my first lead role in the demo video of this. Hollywood here I come!

Thank drpancake in your Oscar speech.

Awesome, I've been doing an audio-only one (and away from Slack)

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