Chats are not dead yet | Hacker News Reader

Chats are not dead yet

amiadogroup.github.com

152 pointsmweibel72 comments

  Awesome Features!

    Beautiful default theme
    Join multiple rooms and start private conversations
    Get notified when new messages arrive
    Ignore spammers and people you don't like
    Moderation: Kick and ban users, change the subject of the room

Um. So basically, they just reinvented IRC, based it on an XMPP backend and spiced it up with a load of funky buzzwords?

I don't get it. XMPP already has everything IRC has.

- Federation

- Multiple (persistent) rooms (Look up XMPP Groupchat)

- Permissions (think chanserv, /mode +ov etc.)

- Private messages

What am I missing? I'm hanging out on IRC every day, on multiple networks. No, I don't use XMPP groupchat so far - just to counter that argument.

The reason for that is, that

- XMPP clients usually suck in that area, in my opinion. So the protocol would be fine for me and I'd like to see IM tied in with groupchat/channels, but really.. Look at the clients and it's like really, really crappy IRC clients (to get back to your point: Yes, those UIs are usually following IRC designs, just with look like from a decade in the past)

- Adoption. For company internal stuff XMPP is great. If someone with high profile (GTalk? Facebook Chat?) would build a product based on this protocol, it would boost the adoption tremendously. On the other hand, as I stated a couple of days earlier in another XMPP discussion: As long as Google or Facebook are not supporting federation, they are not really supporting the core feature of XMPP in my book.

Did they reinvent IRC? No, XMPP did. Years ago, it's an XMPP standard. This is just an IRC client look-alike that doesn't suck completely.

- XMPP clients usually suck in that area, in my opinion.

what do you use for irc? at least irssi and adium do irc and xmpp, i'm sure others do too.

If someone with high profile (GTalk? Facebook Chat?) would build a product based on this protocol, it would boost the adoption tremendously. On the other hand, as I stated a couple of days earlier in another XMPP discussion: As long as Google or Facebook are not supporting federation, they are not really supporting the core feature of XMPP in my book.

huh? google chat does have xmpp federation. i run my own jabber server and talk to a bunch of people that use google chat through the web interface or a jabber client.

IRC:

Well - irssi actually. But when I say that I think that the XMPP clients suck I'm talking about nice and clean GUI things. That I can force upon my non-technical peers.

My 'presence' in this discussion should show that I'm a strong xmpp proponent, crappy clients (in the 'Not for my SO' sense) or not.

pyre said the very same thing in this thread. Sorry for that - I'm clearly mistaken and need to figure out what the reason for this assessment was.. You (and pyre) are correct, federation was announced int 2006(!) here:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/open-federation-for-g...

Thanks a lot for the clarification.

IIRC Google does support federation. At least with Google Apps for Domains, you can add some records to your DNS that enable federation for your domain.

Are we talking about the same thing? XMPP federation? If I've got an account on jabber.org or run ejabberd on my domain, I can add you@yourGAppsDomain.com as buddy, see your presence and can message you, without caring about the server your account is local to?

Edit: See elsewhere in the thread: You are correct, I am wrong. Federation is supported for GTalk since 2006: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/open-federation-for-g...

If you dislike existing XMPP clients, you can use bitlbee (which is an IRC-XMPP gateway you can run on your server) and use your favorite IRC client.

I actually only dislike the MUC presentation most of the time. It always feels bolted on to me.

As I said elsewhere in this thread I'm not really having an issue for myself, but I've yet to find a decent client that I can hand to my peers. That's why I actually like the idea of this project, I guess.

FB and GTalk DO use XMPP. I also imagine that AIM, MSN, and Skype all have some sort of a XMPP implementation as well since they all can talk to FB.

You misread my post - or I was just not clear enough.

I KNOW that they use XMPP. That's why I listed them. But both don't (as far as I know) support the multi user chat extension, the whole point of my answer.

What I wanted to say was this: I don't use the MUC in XMPP (a lot) instead of IRC, because it's just not used anywhere. Google, Facebook, could hopefully "just" add it to their existing chat infrastructure.

Better?

Don't get the negativity. Is there a Javascript-API scriptable, browser-based IRC client out there?

Except that only techies are able to use IRC. You can throw this on a web server and anyone will be able to use it. You could use it for your church chat room or something.

Er, no. That's like saying Linux is only CLI. It's outdated misinformation. There are loads of web clients, and you wouldn't believe what kinds of tech illiterate people I've seen on some networks.

It's funny that your parent is downvoted below zero when he's absolutely right. I don't use IRC very much, but the last time I did, I wanted to use the name I'd registered with previously. Unfortunately, Pidgin kept telling me my name was already in use or some crap. It was quite difficult at the time, not being an initiate in the appropriate vocabulary, to figure out the search terms to use to discover that I needed to "ghost" the user or some ridiculous unintuitive incantation. I may have got the details wrong, but that only confirms my point. IRC is too hard for non-techies. I'm a programmer by profession, and if it gives me the slightest hassle, it's too hard for other people.

Maybe a nice client could make this pain go away, but I doubt it. All the ones I've tried have suffered from the same learning curve problem and the same in-grained assumptions that come from regular use of IRC. Even if one were easy and elegant, I'm not sure that could overcome the negative network effects of so many clients, billed as IRC, doing it badly. I'm not going to analyze it in detail right now, but there's myriad subtracting reinforcements from a community that mostly uses user-unfriendly clients and protocols. You can't just make one good client and get a tipping point. In fact, desktop linux does look like a good analogy here.

Moreover, it would be disingenuous to claim that IRC being techie-unfriendly is "outdated" when the majority of clients and tech how-tos pointing to clients are the same as they ever were. I would guess that the majority of IRC use is still done on unfriendly clients, e.g., Pidgin. One or two low share clients existing don't speak for IRC.

Now, I'm not saying XMPP or this client is an answer. But, yes, IRC is and always will be unpopular with the non-tech population.

I can't tell the difference between IM and IRC in Adium. It's the best non-IRC, IRC client.

Pidgin is another multi-protocol popular option.

Uhm. Some clarifications.

http://www.adium.im/about/ ->

"Based on the _libpurple_ protocol library, Adium can connect you to any number of messaging accounts on any combination of supported messaging services (see further down for the list) and then chat with other people using those services." (Emphasis mine)

http://trac.adium.im/wiki/LibPurple ->

"Libpurple is the library which provides network-level connectivity for most services in Adium. Like Adium itself, it is licensed under the GPL. In addition to Adium, libpurple is the core of the Linux and Windows IM clients Pidgin and Finch. (...)

Libpurple was previously named Libgaim. "

So yeah, Pidgin is an option, because neither Adium nor Pidgin speak IRC, libpurple does. The support should be ~the same~, of course depending on the version of the library used.

More info: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhatIsLibpurple

Does Pidgin do IRC? I didn't think it did.

I wanted to switch to Pidgin a while back because it had support for the kind of encryption I wanted (public key) and Adium didn't, but I ended up not doing it and I thought the reason was because Pidgin doesn't do IRC.

Am I misinformed?

Both Pidgin and Adium are based on libpurple[1], which does support IRC.

1. http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/WhatIsLibpurple

"Pidgin is compatible with the following chat networks out of the box: AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, MySpaceIM, and Zephyr."[2]

2. http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/pidgin

IRC is listed as a supported protocol on the front page of http://www.pidgin.im/

The Pidgin developers are also the libpurple developers- if Adium supports it, so does Pidgin.

This hasn't always gone the other way however. Adium finally added support for IRC recently, though pidgin and libpurple have had it for years.

I just checked to make sure, it does. I think it's had it for years, too.

Yep: Pidgen has supported IRC so long that back when I was still using it, and the project hadn't yet been renamed from Gaim, it already supported it; it had a few stupidities, and didn't support userhost-masks for buddy bindings (something that simply "makes sense" if you use IRC enough), but it definitely worked and still does (I have friends who use it all the time for IRC, and one who even contributes patches to it).

You are absolutely right and I have no idea why you are being downvoted. When is the last time anyone has done IRC in the browser?

What this widget does is potentially bring Facebook Chat or Gmail style Chat to your site. That's worthwhile.

Mibbit is actually pretty good if you want to chat on IRC via a web browser.

This is awesome. I just wish it was a hosted service. Somewhat regularly I want to do an online group chat with some people, and there's no good way to do it. Yeah, you could spend hours trying to get Skype installed on everyone's machine, or teach people how to use IRC (yeah right). But with a nice hosted chat service, I could just click a button, and send everyone a URL and be done with it.

I'm surprised no one has gone after this use case. I would even potentially pay a couple bucks for a "day pass" or whatever. Convore could've gone in this direction, but their signup process is too onerous. I don't want to have to walk five people in my family through signing up for their service just to get a chat going.

A large number of New York City startups use something called PartyChat (hosted on AppEngine). It is maintained by some current/former NYC Googlers, and basically creates an IRC style chat interface over XMPP, allowing you to create fairly full featured chatrooms using your various Gtalk or XMPP accounts. It's easily extensible with commands and "hooks", so you can pipe code commits, deploy messages, alerts, and the like into the chatroom.

http://partychapp.appspot.com/

Also check out partychat-hooks for simple HTTP API integration. It was written by one of our engineers at bitly to ease some of the aforementioned integrations. http://partychat-hooks.appspot.com/

Wow, this is an excellent tool. Can't believe I haven't heard about it before now.

This is awesome, love that it uses basic XMPP as the interface

There is a very-well developed multi-person JS chat: http://www.mibbit.com/

With great cross-browser compatibility and rich functionality like file uploads and in-line previews you can't go wrong. Uses certain well established IM transport protocol that plays nice with your text-mode IM client ;-)

Yes, you can embed it on your website. Either ad-supported or paid-for.

It seems you missed the part where he said "teach people how to use IRC (yeah right)".

The frontpage of mibbit is an instant "close-tab" to a non-nerd user.

You can just link directly to a server/chatroom on mibbit. No need for your users to ever see their frontpage.

Their chat-interface isn't better either.

Honestly, would you send a mibbit link in a professional context to an non-nerd contact?

Well, that was a rhetoric question... The colors are terrible, the whole thing looks like a relic from the 90s and there's way too much tech exposed.

It's IM that uses the right transport protocol. GUI matters to users, and that's plain IM GUI.

Fixed my earlier post.

finch (a text mode client) should support xmpp (both as a well established IM protocol as well as a underrepresented multi user chat protocol) just fine. ;-)

At a previous employer we used Hipchat ( https://www.hipchat.com/ ) for this. Hosted service, had logging (which was exceedingly useful, it turns out), and a bunch of other features.

We (BakedCode) built http://prompt.im a few months back as a bit of fun (took us about 1-2 days to build) which sounds like what you're after. Here's an example: http://prompt.im/hackernews

http://tinychat.com/anythinghere

has audio/video also

Yahoo has support for chat rooms (conferences). I used it both at work and with friends.

Suprised no one has yet brought up the obvious comparison to campfirenow.com and hipchat.com. While being free and self host-able is nice, the Candy UI seems light years behind its for pay competitors.

But I'm glad to see more options available. I've been advocating web-based chat in my offices for quite a while now, and am happy that a few decent choices have finally started to pop up in the past couple years.

I agree it would be better if they just focused on this being used for building chat into apps, rather than being ready out of the box as a chat widget.

The good thing about Candy: You can extend it with plugins and customize the interface, both very easy. If you'd like more features - do it!

What I really miss is character-at-a-time chat, a la unix 'talk/ntalk/ytalk' or VMS 'PHONE'. It created an intimacy you can't get with line-at-a-time solution, and there is, as far as I know, NO modern replacement for it - literally no way at all to do this any more other than actually setting up and using talk and talkd.

It's sort of possible to emulate it using something like etherpad, but it's really not at all the same.

Interesting. I never thought of this feature as 'intimate'. Most of the time I was annoyed, seeing the other one type

o n e c h a r a t a t i m e

I prefer waiting for a full line, that (hopefully) makes sense. And I try to convince myself that the person I'm chatting with right now isn't slow as molasses, he just takes a moment of time to think before typing a well-considered reply.

Wave was like that. :-)

It wasn't, though - updates were 'chunky' - you'd type a few words, and the other person would see them all appear at once. Even that little bit of loss of real-time destroys the illusion of a shared space.

Google Docs used to be like that, but Wave was capable of character-by-character updates. You would see updates in larger chunks if latency was high enough, but I've participated in several waves where I could see characters appearing one to three at a time.

You can (could?) do it with ICQ, it had an option.

Ah, VMS PHONE.

Where the other party's typing skills (or lack thereof) are on full display.

As for the character-at-a-time display, iChat can provide something like that. On Mac OS X circa 10.6, select iChat > Accounts > select an account > and check the Send text as I type checkbox.

Again - it sends it in 'chunks' of 5 or 10 chars at a time, which is not what I want.

Here you go (real-time text transmitted in-band over an XMPP session):

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/07/07/2014214/Real-Time-Te...