New Chat Thing Convore Is Google Wave Minus the Suck
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
I don't see where it can be compared to wave. They seem to compare it to IRC, but also IRC is a protocol, convore is just a service.
I still hope wave sees some progress as apache project. :(
Edit: I should point out that if you don't understand what buster or I am talking about, don't worry. A lot of people don't. It's Google's failed marketing of Wave that did this.
Basically, people thought Google Wave was MS Outlook, or Gmail. It wasn't. Wave was essentially email, comments, chat, communication, etc. Once you start understanding everything it could do, and understand that everyone already knew how to use Wave, you really started to appreciate what they were trying to do.
[1] https://groups.google.com/group/wave-protocol/browse_thread/...
Moreover: nobody cares. People do not care how the tools work. They care about their problems. Having an online conversation in the right mode - not too high-latency, yet not too synchronous, and not too disorganized - is a problem. Users understand that IRC and Wave and Convore are all billed as attempts to solve that problem. Therefore, they are all kind of alike.
If people actually use these tools for a while even non-engineers will eventually come to understand the substantial differences between them, but another way that Wave and Convore and IRC are all alike is that right now most customers have never heard of them, let alone tried them, let alone figured them out.
Anyway, i'm eagerly waiting for the completion of the incubator process on apache[1] and will take another look at the state of wave afterwards. I still think the project is one of the most underrated projects of the last years. I very much hope that the project won't just die.
[1] http://www.waveprotocol.org/wave-in-a-box/apache-incubator-r...
They failed to create a killer product.
Everyone can write a website that let's people chat in groups, right? I mean.. really... THAT is easy. ;)
Getting people to use what you built is the hard bit.
As for people not caring: that's a result of not understanding the real product and the real potential. Assuming Wave is just about real time communication is really doing it a great disservice.
A good example would be hosting a wave server like people host email servers. So, my domain could have it's own wave server. This would mean my comment here could easily be included on my blog. This would let me blog all my comments. Keep in mind, HN would have to support wave, but then commenting would still work the same way. Anyways, my comment would appear on my blog, and I could see your reply. I wouldn't have to remember to visit HN.
The interface to wave was essentially anything you already used. There are a lot of other really cool things you could do with this. And they told people you could do all this with it.
Unfortunately, they pushed the Wave UI as well, closing it up in a beta with special invites and suddenly people treated it like Gmail++.
So when you see people commenting how they really hope wave survives and eventually takes off, it's because what if does take off, things will get really interesting really fast.
Basically, I just feel Google didn't do Wave justice by only providing that one client.
This seems risky. There's a lot of public IRC rooms I'd avoid if they allowed anyone to show me anything they wanted. IRC solves this by not embedding images, Wave solves this by being oriented towards small groups rather than public discussions, forums solve this by making it difficult enough to register that a ban matters. How is Convore going to solve this?
I remember Chatterous trying a similar play but can't recall what happened to them. Maybe the GUI wasn't so slick or maybe they pivoted into something we're unaware of...
> and it would be a definite plus if...
you are registered at and regularly read Hacker News (and send us your username if you do)
Given that, I really want to see convore integration with jabber/gtalk somehow, but I'm not sure how it would work for rooms+topics versus just rooms.
The only problem with it I have is the name! Maybe it's because I'm Australian. We say it like "Con-vaw". Is that right? I can't imagine telling someone in person "hey I was on CON-VAW the other night and this guy said such and such". Really weird name but a nicely executed product.
Most Aussies would probably take one of the -o or -ies/-ers "colliqualization" rules :-) My bet is on convo.
Nice work.
One of the things we really wanted to have before we launched was an initial version of an API ready so that people could experiment with building things like you describe. We've been happy so far that people have started to do just that, including someone going so far as to start working on an Android client! https://github.com/Pewpewarrows/Convoid
We happily encourage efforts to integrate with other services, although it can be tricky due to our added layer of structure (topics) that both sets us apart, but also makes it match up less cleanly with existing clients and services.
Maybe I can do that using https://convore.com/api/groups/:group_id.json -- but where is the doc about what it returns?
Anyways, it's nice to see that more and more new services come with an (often open) API. Well done :)
This could be really killer if it allowed uploads of arbitrary attachments and images. Could see it as an interesting way of keeping a log with a client.
Right now we haven't offered this as a feature because we're a free app, and hosting more than a few files and images would be cost prohibitive. We're definitely open to building it in the future if it can be subsidized somehow, or if we directly charge for it.
http://oi53.tinypic.com/2w1wfn7.jpg - I can't find a better screenshot
Seems TR is like news, only without fact checking. I was playing with Wave just the other day.
EDIT: TR, not TC. Thanks, internet!
The "new" facebook groups can group chat (with online members of a group) and also semi-message (via a news feed) and could potentially message a bunch of guys in the group via facebook messages.
Of course they haven't done it to the point of having short topic threads of any kind, which is what I like with concore. (in fact, every topic in a group in convore is like a channel of its own.)
1983 with talk. Anybody got anything earlier?
Ignore.
I see convore as a great alternative to the Twitter hashtag. A richer, more real-time, better indexed alternative. It can still use Twitter for Outreach but the action is in convore.