Show HN: a new team chat web/irc tool | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: a new team chat web/irc tool

teamchat.net

33 pointsnic-ferrier41 comments

Congratulations, Nic, on what is likely the world's first Emacs-hosted startup! For those who don't know, teamchat is implemented in Emacs Lisp using Nic's elnode (async web server) and shoesoff (IRC bouncer) libraries, among others.

Thanks jlf!

You guys at #emacs have helped this happen. An awesome community.

Well, that was deflating.

Sent out the link to several co-workers (since we are looking for this sort of tool right now) and then we all get the "We'll let you know when we go live" email.

So thanks for making me look like an idiot.

I'll try and prioritize your teams access. Send us an email or hit me up directly on twitter: http://twitter.com/nicferrier

This^. Did the exact same :S

If you ping me on twitter I'll make sure you're prioritized. We are obviously wanted teams to try this to tell us what is good and what isn't. So if you're a team we want you basically.

I would be really excited to try this. Is it live yet? I always think it's better to save Show HN posts for products that we can actually play with. Looking forward to seeing this in any case.

I know... I know. I prefer that too.

The trouble is this is for teams, you kinda have to have a team. We wanted to gauge interest so we've done it this way.

If we can we'll go live for collections of people (if there are 2 or 3 people from the same company email domain) this week or next.

Can you please make it clear on the register page that there is no publicly available product yet?

I had three guys from my team sign up so we could test it out, and only after signing up did we find out that it's not live yet.

will do. I'll also try and make sure you get prioritized for go live.

Can you publish your numbers afterward? Or just whether you thought it was worth it? (Or something along those lines)

I have seen this strategy recommended to gauge interest, but have always been wary of doing it myself (for exactly this reason: people being like "wtf? this isn't real?").

It is probably one of those things that should be done, even if it makes you uncomfortable.

That's basically it. We've worked on this for quite a while and I reckon we could just keep going... This way we can gauge interest and prioritize teams who sign up.

And yes. I will publish results later in the week.

I'm about a day away from releasing Gnotty, which is a similar tool but open source: https://github.com/stephenmcd/gnotty

Mobile-friendly IRC web client, private rooms, and bots with commands/webhooks.

I'm not going to advertize it that much (because I don't want to support people that way yet) but all the code behind teamchat.net is freely available on github.

Awesome :-)

I was just about to try setting up Gnotty for our IRC channel based on the repo, can't wait to see what you'll be releasing.

What's in the GitHub repo is entirely it - I'm just working on a blog post to announce it, so you can get started right now.

Doesn't appear to be live yet (the confirmation email says they'll send a message when they are).

Minor point: It would be nice to be able to click those screenshots and get bigger versions. It's currently very difficult to see what the application looks like.

There are some bigger screenshots on the about page.

Bigger ones now provided.

Just a heads up: you haven't set a page header/name yet!

There's also an extra closing div tag in there.

awww man. templating. thanks for catching.

Images are not clickable for full resolution.

they are now.

I built something like this (a long time ago) for my own purposes. So did a startup we're working with!

That says there might be a need for it, but on the downside it's really simple to build, so competition can spring up very quickly.

it's simple to build a simple one... but the more polished takes more time. Why not just offload that work to someone else? That's our view anyway. We've chatted to some potential clients and other companies running their operations this way.

There are very nice solutions out there already, Microsoft Lync & IBM Sametime.

Love the idea! About time someone did this. What's the tech stack like?

It's all emacslisp. Including the webserver (it's elnode). So there is an irc bouncer written in elisp tightly integrated with the elnode webapp. The bouncer uses a modified rcirc (built into emacs) to connect to the irc servers.

The robot framework is also written in emacslisp.

The irc servers are ngircd and the webserver is nginx.

Bomb-diggity. I saw your gravatar and immediately thought "Omy is this an el-node projet!?" Sweet.

I'm kinda surprised that people haven't picked up on that bit and asked questions. You'd have thought hackers would be interested in that bit :-)

I tried to register with a .co.za (South Africa) domain name and it caused the following error: not a valid email address?

Looking forward to seeing the product!

That should be fixed.

kind of similar to grove:

https://grove.io

i think what could really make the difference is the video chat feature though. if properly implemented...does it work fluently?

Yes. We're veterans of previous video startups. This is video meeting done right. It's not a big part of the product but it is important coz it means you don't need skype or hangout or whatever in addition to this.

I'm looking to write an open source app with basically similar video chat functionality. Could I ask what's the best way of implementing this?

I'm guessing WebRTC would be the way to go... once it is released at least

www.mebeam.com/chat_team

yeah. there are loads of alternative video chat apps. that's not the point of teamchat.

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