Real-Time Yammer Competitor Hall Launches New Apps | Hacker News Reader

Real-Time Yammer Competitor Hall Launches New Apps

techcrunch.com

46 pointstimc36 comments

I read the article top to bottom and couldn't figure out what it is that Hall does.

> This startup is interested in building what comes next after the “social intranet.”

I don't know what the social intranet is or was, I certainly have no idea "what comes next" -- and the article doesn't say.

> At Intuit, Hellman was the only person on his team at the Mountain View office, which led to the original inspiration that later became today’s Hall. “That’s where I learned we needed a better way to communicate,” he says.

What was that better way??!? Better than what? He doesn't say.

These "articles" don't try to inform, they just throw buzz words around; they are instruments for companies to do PR, but the reader is the victim.

Full disclosure: Yammer is owned and operated by Microsoft.

Yes

Hi bambax, I'm one of the founders here at Hall. Apologies for any frustration... Does visiting our landing page help? https://hall.com . If not, send me an email at brett @ hall-inc.com . I'd be happy to give you a live demo.

Every page on the site redirects to a login/signup page on my iPhone. I cannot read anything about the product or company.

That's a mobile redirect bug on our end. Thanks for pointing this out. Expect an update soon.

Help me with

  The Hall web app is 6 times faster than existing enterprise solutions

That's just as confusing? Can you explain that in a couple more sentences? My CTO just raved about 'We need to give Yammer a try, someone just recommended it'.

Why wouldn't we (ignoring my own 'what the hell is a social intranet' questions)? Can you give me a pitch in three sentences?

We invested in building a Single Page Application (SPA) which means when you use Hall, click around, the page never refreshes.

This helps our customers get things done insanely fast. Imagine if Gmail was a website and not a web app, that's what other enterprise apps feel like IMO.

Also, Hall is one of the few enterprise companies that has a true SPA. We ended up building a highly customized framework on top of Backbone.js, Node, Zepto. If you're curious to learn more I'm sure our CTO would be happy to write an engineering post when he has a moment. Let me know.

I'm really not trying to be a dick here.

Why do I care about a single page application and how does that make your app 'six times faster than unnamed other solutions'?

I fail to see the connection to GMail (I thought you want to move away from the 'why not just email?')?

"A true SPA"? I failed to find out what 'SPA' means [1], I thought SLA first but got confused.

Nothing personal, but your reply didn't help a bit for this single guy here. I was complaining about marketing terms on your site and got .. a response on the same level.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPA

Developers probably aren't the intended audience. Yammer, Chatter, Hall, etc are going after enterprise customers.

developers think: "oh irc, on _the_ web"

Hi darklajid, I'm CTO of Hall. Let me know if you have any additional technical questions about the app. As Brett said, it's probably time to start doing some more technical blog postings.

Hey, I'll forward that internally (it seems we are going to introduce a solution like yours/yammers in the near future, based on the "I want this!!" face I saw today).

But yeah, more technical information would be nice. I would _guess_ (wildly, with little information..) that your standard target customer is the management type - at least that's what the website shows me right now (and 'six times faster than some unknown enterprise solutions' is really .. weird).

If you go for more technical details or really just more "Look, this is why we're doing cool stuff" posts: I'd be interested to learn more.

I'm just wondering what did you use to package your webapp for desktops?

Thanks!

stokanic, we started with adobe air which was a quick way to test our hypothesis early on that a desktop app would increase retention. We have since moved on to building native experience w xcode.

Ah, I see you've only done the desktop app for osx and not win. I was hoping you'd use something like CEF[1] and that you'd blog about it

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/

This is a bit off-topic, but since you posted here - the "hall" logo in header could use tighter kerning between the "a" and the first "l".

Also, I personally found the landing page pretty useful in terms of explaining the core user stories (group chat, 1v1, file sharing), so kudos from me.

Wow, thanks mmatants. I like your eye for detail re: our logo. I'd love to hear more about your feelings about the app itself. (I'm CTO of Hall btw.) Thanks for checking it out!

> Does visiting our landing page help?

Yes, thanks (although one needs to scroll to get the information); apparently Hall is a group chat solution for the enterprise? Seems nice and useful.

I had no problem with Hall BTW, but with how the article was written.

IRC! It's another irc-alike, IRC for people who use excel

-former founder of an irc-alike for people who use excel

Your copy on the landing page (under the blue circle-ish images) is very hard to read.

The logo has an issue with spacing between the letters. The "a" is too far fromn the first "l".

The pricing page is not quite clear. What do I get with the free plan? Can I "friend" my co-workers? A paragraph explaining it would be nice. Five dollars seems like the wrong price for this sort of deal. Even the cheapest option on github is seven dollars.

I would love to test your headline.

The top segment of the landing page says nothing. There are no testimonials, no text explaining what you do, nothing. Just a signup box which does not seem to fit in the whole context.

This copy has the wrong rhythm:

About Hall

Hall helps teams and companies communicate in real-time. Our all-in-one unified communications app has everything your company needs to communicate and get things done. There are thousands of companies using Hall, from small businesses to the world's largest enterprises like Amazon and Nike. Professionals love using Hall to communicate.

Sentence structure is way too long, and confusing. Let me take a quick stab at it.

About us:

Hall aims to do one thing. Help your team communicate in real time. It achieves that with a state-of-the-art status panel. You can easily keep track of what your team is doing. Get things done by using our hassle-free communication tools. Its your own intelligence network.

Who uses Hall to make their lives easier? Big Companies like Nike, Amazon to smaller team like yours. They all have one thing in common: No matter the size, everyone just loves Hall.

But don't take our word for it. Try Hall now. See what you have been missing. Its free.

By the way, go ahead and use that if you want. :)

"Real-Time Yammer", social intranet... The enterprise jargon in this article makes it almost impossible to understand that Hall seems to be just another group chat tool for companies similar to Hipchat and Flowdock.

About time! Besides the hype & price of Yammer, it really sucks at real-time comms for teams smaller than 5-6.

I have never had a chance to use it with a bigger team but at that size they have abysmal state management - if you have more than 1 conversation && use more than 1 device = notification_hell. Its just silly how badly they manage this stuff.

Just discovered Hall earlier today and so far, so good! Good job @bretthellman & team.

Thanks iusable! If you'd like, connect with me on hall here:

https://hall.com/brett

It would be great to chat, hear your feedback on hall and where we're headed. Thanks

I'm using it at a 100-person office but nobody wants to integrate yet-another-step into their daily processes or have to hop around different places to get different pieces of information (because naturally, John Doe will always want to do it his way if there isn't a policy otherwise or when it becomes too chaotic). It's the same 5-10 of us that make irregular posts and maybe an additional 5 that will occasionally lurk when they remember to. I suspect those people use the desktop client and just always have it running. No one takes advantage of the chat, the secret groups (okay, maybe one team is that I'm not aware of), or the file-sharing. That said, I've complained about the shoddy design and the confusing interface here before, so I'm happy it didn't take off internally.

This has led me to believe that if they're not able to use social features from within the software they're already using (that's already connected to our existing data), they probably won't use them to any effective capacity at all. We run a homebrew CRM, but I don't think slapping a chat or a file system into it will suddenly fix the problem. That said, I think company culture has a lot to do with it too; getting up and talking to people and scheduling meetings with them is highly encouraged here.

That all said, Jive's business enterprise stuff is probably the best in this arena right now because of how much you can do with it and how extensible it is, but I've been asking for us to switch for two years to no avail because management doesn't see the value in constant, but passive, streams of information.

The first comment is a self promoting alternative (daPulse) whose website looks very similar and whose product, much like the one being promoted, just looks like a slightly different Yammer. This seems to be an unnecessarily crowded space.

EDIT: Not the first comment...just the top one at the time I read the article (didn't realize comments on TC are sorted as newest first by default)

aguynamedrich, What Yammer did well is reinvent the social intranet for making announcements inside the firewall. It allowed for one person inside a company of 1000s to broadcast to the entire company.

What Yammer never had a chance to perfect before being purchased/killed was how to be the place where people actually work... The way people work has changed in the last few years. People are working 24/7, using multiple devices, working in distributed teams, in teams that are cross-company etc... These changes making communicating in real-time a necessity which is why Hall is focused on real-time communications.

So how do you guys solve the issue of most "enterprise social software" being nothing but a fairly shallow replacement for / complement to, email?

(Disclaimer: I'm the founder of a startup that's also playing in this space (depending on how broadly you define "this space"), and I don't really know if we're competitors or not!)

So, I'm playing with this with my team... And I'm not so sure that I "get it". How is this better than using Skype or IRC? What am I missing? I like the clean interface, but I'm not sure what value I'm getting out of it. How does this compare to Yammer or Jostle?

Our company's using Lync internally (MS shop, everything is golden if it comes from Redmond).

I'd like to understand as well what this would offer that Lync doesn't - and that's from a guy that isn't a fan of Lync in the first place.

I guess a decent Android client would be nice.. What else?

darklajid Would love to discuss... Can you msg me at brett @ hall-inc.com or if you're on hall, https://hall.com/brett

How is Hall's "real-time" real-timier than those of Yammer's or a number of other enterprise activity-stream apps?

Its pretty much a given that an activity stream app will use an socketi.io-ish messaging systme for real-time updates, some sort of APN service for mobile notifications and a visual tool for in-web-app notifications.

What does Hall bring to the table that differentiates it from other Activity stream[1] apps

*disclaimer: I work for Socialcast, VMWare's Social Enterprise App that has had these features for a while now.

#hint We have a Freemium model where 99% of features are provided for free to companies with less than 50 users.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activity_stream

Hi codenerdz....I'm CTO and co-founder of Hall. Our entire application is a single page application (no refreshing). That immediately makes our product more realtime than Yammer. This includes one-on-one messaging, file sharing, group chat, collaborative notepads, 3rd party integrations and friendship/contact management in multiple rooms and multiple networks. While Yammer may have elements that are RT, our entire world is RT.

A few people at our company signed up for Hall and invited others, causing a runaway chain of invitation reminders that drove our entire team nuts. Not a great way to get introduced to a product.

Hi cal5k....CTO of Hall here. We apologize for the inconvenience. We're constantly trying to optimize the way we send network invitations. We're still working out the kinks and finding the right balance for notifications. You can contact me at ron @ hall-inc.com or if you're on hall, https://hall.com/ron if you'd like us to take a look at your specific case.

How is this different than Skype?

* I can have permanent group chats in Skype

* 1-on-1 chat

* Skype is supported in all devices

* I can share files

Am I missing something?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com