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Comment by mjackson | Hacker News Reader

Hey all! Co-founder of HUM here, and happy to answer any questions you may have about it. We've been cranking away on this product for the better part of the past year and are very excited to be rolling it out over the coming weeks.

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I have a few questions!

What does Hum offer that Google Hangouts doesn't? That just about every other alternative chat offering doesn't? (Keeping in mind that all sorts of people are already segregated by many of these services, including Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger which currently doesn't support any kind of annexing.)

Also where do you place 'security' in your list of priorities in regards to Hum. ('Secure, security, encryption, encrypted' are words that do not appear on your launch page.)

What's Hum's relationship with Email? Will it be integrated in any capacity? Also, not in a technical manner, but how will Hum be different than any other chat program?

Hum is able to both send and receive emails. People who receive stuff you send over email will be able to reply using the usual reply button, but it's not a full-fledged email client. The email integration is there to make it easy for folks who'd like to use it with their existing network of email contacts.

In addition, every Hum user gets an email address at letshum.com that they can use for incoming email.

This didn't address the question of how Hum will be different than any other chat program

Yeah, it kind of did.

Which chat program do you know can send a message as an email? And receive chat messages via an email address?

It seems the idea behind this, is that it's a "persistent chat".

Doesn't Facebook chat integrate with email in the exact same way?

No, because it only works with facebook... ?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't I open Gmail, send someone a message (@letshum.com or @facebook.com), and they receive it as a Hum or Facebook chat message? Then, they can reply to the message in their chat client as if it were a text, and it goes to my Gmail? That seems quite similar, and in both cases I can communicate using email, while my friend uses chat. This seems to be the underlying reason why both services give every user an email address, so I fail to see how this sets Hum apart from other chat apps.

Facebook has announced their intention to retire @facebook.com addresses, forwarding mail sent to them to the user's primary email address and making all chats involving @facebook.com addresses read only.

If I may, linkedin does allow users to correspond with each other using both mail clients or directly through their platforms. The part that I am not too sure about is how does Hum solve user problems that whatsapp/wechat can't. The gap I find as a user is that unless there are ways for Hum to integrate with the fragmented contact databases we have across the various social networks (i.e. my gmail, 1k+ linkedin contacts, facebook friends, twitter correspondence etc) and make my life easier, I may not venture and try yet another chat platform.

You aren't wrong, but you only described half the feature.

Send an email to someone new from your facebook chat.

Regardless, this is clearly a different product, if you want to try really hard to think it's not, that is your prerogative.

You should mention this in your HN profile. Your other comment here was in gray because it looks like astroturfing.

Thanks for the tip! Just updated by profile.

It looks (very much) like Google Hangouts in your trailer video. Right now, hangouts is pretty much installed on every new android phone, so i assume you have some kind of edge on hangouts to gain traction on Android?

Is it mac only? I am poor and I cannot afford a mac :(

No. ;) There is a Mac desktop client but the app will be available on the web as well.

I am wondering you can release a windows client. Web is acceptable but not perfect (i.e. cannot provide notifications).

you can build it on .NET. Don't care about XP, FUCK THESE XP USERS.

You can provide notifications on the web. Support maybe limited to some browsers only but it is possible.

This works in Chrome: http://jsfiddle.net/dandv/wT26x/1/

I think Safari has a system for this too: https://developer.apple.com/notifications/safari-push-notifi...

Firefox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/API/notification

CanIUse stats: http://caniuse.com/notifications

Although it's not quite the same as a native app, we already have built in support for desktop notifications on all browsers that support them, including some older WebKits.

so how about a tray icon? AFAIK there is no way to create one using HTML5.

What do you need the tray icon for...?

There are still a great many organizations that are using XP. It's a reliable and battle tested OS. Ignoring these users wouldn't be a good idea, I don't think.

Will there be an API for 3rd-party clients (perhaps ones that become officially sanctioned ones at some point), so that we can build a proper desktop client for those that don't run Macs?

That's a beautiful launch page. I like that you subtly get the user to scroll down.

Yea I noticed that too. You initially scroll down to see the rest of that sample chat inbox, which provides a smooth transition between the div with the background video and the div with the main content (since the first chat inbox spills into the second div). Looks good.

You mean to get rid of the annoyingly distracting video?

Nice work!

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