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Comment by shanelja | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the phone applications, what makes Hipchat better than say, Skype?

The biggest difference is that HipChat is primarily about "rooms" and less about messaging individual people (although you can do that too). It makes for much better team workflow, because it enables a lot more passive information sharing. Most people in a room don't want to be actively involved in everything, but they would like to passively just see what's going on.

Secondly, it's centralized around a company, so you know that everyone has everyone else on HipChat, unlike Skype, where everyone needs to manage their contact list separately.

Finally, the notification features are really nice. I can just @mention someone's name, and it's like summoning them into the room to answer a question for me. It's way smoother than adding someone to a Skype conversation, since they'll be able to trace back the history of the conversation.

Good summary. HipChat is simply very tuned to the needs of a workgroup, not just simple IMing. I especially found that it was good at notifying via email about a missed chat you likely want to have a look at.

Rooms can be created on Skype, that's the way we use skype in our business, we create a group chat between all the relevant people and then favorite it and it's the same as a room.

The contact list issue is good I think for larger companies especially in the beginning.

I'm wondering about how the integrations could be used in our business, and I'm also wondering if we can integrate our software with HipChat

I think the difference is that rooms are a focus of HipChat, and an afterthought / hack in Skype. Similar to how individual, "not in a room" conversation is an afterthought in HipChat.

In both cases you can technically do it, but the app doesn't go out of it's way to make it easy or well-supported. If you find you're using your favorited lists to chat more than one-on-one conversations, I'd really recommend trying out HipChat.

For what it's worth, we regularly use Skype at our office as well as HipChat. They both excel at what they were designed to do, and we don't necessarily see a problem with using two tools if it means you don't have to shove a round peg into a square hole.

HipChat has an API and a lot of services proposes hooks to post to HipChat. Our "Saloon" usually looks along the line of :

GitHub - mickey commented on issue 104 of xxx/fronted: +1

GitHub - yoktan pushed to branch master of xxx/frontend - Txt (c7bd9a3)

Jenkins - backend-master - #481 FAILURE after 3 min 18 sec (Open)

Bugsnag - Exception in production from frontend in votes#index (details) RuntimeError: # app/controllers/votes_controller.rb:6 - index

It's more like IRC, and the one thing that really makes it better is the chat history (which you could do with an IRC bot, but then you have to maintain that). The push notifications when someone messages you when you're offline are pretty nice too.

> which you could do with an IRC bot, but then you have to maintain that

That's exactly the use case for which I started building http://www.getinstabot.com/, but I haven't seen much interest, sadly.

Great idea. I signed up. Please keep developing the product!

Thanks, interest is what will motivate me enough to work on this. I saw your email, I'll email you soon to ask you some things, if that's okay!

Looks nice to me! You've got my email now. :)

Thanks, emailed :-)

Does anyone have IRC as a service? I used to run an IRC server for my company, but as mentioned, there is the maintenance part. There is already more work that needs to be done than hours to do it.

I would like to see more start ups utilize existing protocols such as RSS and IRC.

There was a company, but I think they shut down. I can't remember the name now, but it was, basically, hosted IRC.

Your are thinking of http://grove.io from Leah Culver of Pownce and Convor. Convor shut down and she started Grove, still there and running plus it has a sensible revenue model.

Oh yes, that's what I was thinking of, thank you.

They canceled my free student organization plan on me when they changed owners :(

The thing that is nice about Hipchat, it pains me to say, is that messages actually get delivered the moment you send them. Skype is completely unpredictable.

Group chat, GitHub Integration, persistent, searchable chat logs, Zapier integration to DropBox and Trello.

I trialled HipChat a little while ago, but there is no phone?

For me that was a deal breaker - if it had a skype-like talk option as well, it would serve the purpose. People like the all-in-one tool that Skype is, even if the chat side is weak.

IIRC they also support voice and video chat, but I have yet to use that part of the product.

Well, I couldn't find it anywhere in the product, and believe me I was looking.

It's essentially pretty IRC. What makes it better than IRC is a better question. The answer is that you don't have to setup and maintain an IRC server, and have the power of bots through APIs.

The other answer is that it's a lot easier to get less-technical people onto it.

HipChat's API's are severely lacking. There's no way to read messages from chat without using their halfway working XMPP implementation on a separate user account.

On the other hand, sending and receiving messages to IRC is pretty simple and straightforward. There are also tons of IRC libraries.

My company recently started using Skype as a free hipchat-like service. My complaints with it so far have been: -you have to explicitly enable history to have people entering a conversation see it. -When I send a message on my computer, I get a notification about my own message on my phone.

Messages sent in a Skype chat room when you are offline are only sent to your client when other members of the room are online. So if you sign on before the rest of the participants in the morning, you don't see any messages sent overnight until someone else joins.

Pros: search logs, other integrations Cons: no phone calls! which I use quite a bit. free for teams bigger than 5.

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