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78 pointstsudot65 comments

Also, does it annoy anyone else when they don't even put a small amount of text telling what a program/service does on the front page?

I don't want to watch some video where people fawn over their great new service. I just want to quickly read what it does and move on (or sign up or download, whichever is appropriate).

> Also, does it annoy anyone else when they don't even put a small amount of text telling what a program/service does on the front page?

Annoys the heck out of me. Wish every front page was like YC's, or Deck networks (no sarcasm, quite serious). I do not know if most <whoever responsible for company website frontpage> are idiots, or is this what sells, and the idiot is me.

edit: responsible for, not from.

Launching an app on HN?

TL;DR <5 words

What do you mean? Isn't it clear?

> Your files and messages. Always in sync. On all devices. Team communication is now a simple, common-sense thing. Make it yours.

It's clear after you spend 3 seconds on their site. There should be a demo or UI mockups without hitting play on a video (which shows no UI) so folks can see if it will work for them. It comes off that it is actual vaporware right now even if it's not.

Apple, Google, and Microsoft all promise this, as do a ton of smaller companies. So no, this buzzphrase doesn't differentiate fleep much at all.

Apologies if I missed some subtle sarcasm. :)

That said, their homepage seems passable to me. Maybe they added some content in the past few hours?

Yeah, it was sarcasm. I like the look of the page, I guess the pictures communicate what it is enough to explore it further, but the message I pasted is really horrible.

"I just want to quickly read what it does and move on"

It just took me a few seconds to see that it doesn't support linux (except Android) or any other free operating system, and move on. (If "chat for dynamic teams" wasn't enough.)

Web browsers don't exist in linux land?

Yes, I see that it has "for browser," too; point taken. But experience indicates that when a service has native implementations and also a version that works in a web browser, the latter is very likely to be slow, clumsy, and incomplete. If the browser version is a first-class citizen, then usually there is no native version, because there is no need for one. For example, Gmail.

I think your experience is rather limited, then. At least in the enterprise space, there's a need for both native clients and their full-featured web-based counterparts. They fulfill different, equally valid needs. Generally speaking, if a company's web-based products offer limited functionality, they become a big liability in competitive situations.

If this is true, then this outfit is missing the native component for any free OS, which was my original point, wasn't it?

Is this solving some problem that Hipchat, Campfire, Slack, Kandan, Unison, etc. don't already solve?

And asana, flowdock, etc...

I guess it is a massive market and thus there is a lot to go around.

We used to use hipchat (campfire clone) but it was hard to follow lengthy conversations and favorite details for later. Flowdock for our uses is a zillion times better and can integrate with basically anything.

Asana is also amazing

I wouldn't compete in either of the spaces because it's so competitive and the apps are better than they were 5 years ago. 10x better would require so much cash and time, for the possibility of not capturing enough market to be viable.

Are any of these available for companies that can't ship all their internal conversations and files to the cloud? Are XMPP/IRC and overpriced 'enterprise' suites still the go to for private chat?

Both Kandan and Unison can be deployed on your own server

The problem with all of those services is a lack of a strong desktop client that isn't just their web app inside a browser container.

But what is the actual problem there? I've used HipChat before and I'm really not sure why I would care that it's using a web runtime inside the app.

Hipchat desktop clients are native now, actually.

http://blog.hipchat.com/2013/10/24/hipchat-is-all-native/

... and just added voice and video today.

The problem with all of these things, in my opinion, is that they aren't IRC. Real time chat has been a solved problem since May of 1993.

I've never been able to trust IRC.

There's nothing untrustworthy about IRC.

Last time I looked into it, security was not a big emphasis for the IRC protocol in general [1], and setting up your own IRC server and finding high-quality open-source/free clients was more trouble than it is worth.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat#Challenges

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/UnrealIRCd

Slack offers an IRC and XMPP gateway, I think HipChat does as well.

What happened in April 1997? Isn't that a long time post-IRC?

I had the date wrong.

I think you're still late; a quick look suggests August 1988 is the date you're looking for?

I had meant to refer to the date RFC 1459 was published. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459.html

IRC does not solve half of the problems all of these products do. Persistence, for starters.

What kind of persistence are you talking about? I use ZNC, which means I'm always logged in (and set /away when I'm not actually there), and I get logs saved to disk.

I don't see a point of trying it out unless there's a pricing model described - and I can't find any on their site.

It's free while in beta: https://fleep.io/faq

You use it when it's in beta, get the team used to it, build workflow around it... then find out how much it costs?

No thanks.

Definitely a turn off with anything that has a steep learning curve or high switching costs. I.e. pretty much everything in productivity and communication.

I'm having a hard time with the juxtaposition of upvotes to negative comment ratio. I was in the latter camp, ready to write a mini rant on "WTF another chat app?".

I found it more interesting that people are expressing interest in this; demonstrating a complete polar opposite of the comments. Is this a situation of people upvoting because they abhor the idea?

I upvoted because I like seeing new projects/apps on hackernews and this one appears as though they did put a good amount of time into building the site. Sure it's been done before but most things worth doing have been. Although I can't think of many problems that hipchat or flowdock do not solve.

I'm curious to hear what others think is still an open web app market? Or what category of products can still be improved upon?

If you want to truly add value, find large businesses to help. They're riddled with old software and inefficient processes. It's highly feasible to write custom software applications that can save larger corporations millions of dollars with a minimal amount of development time. The hardest part is:

    1) Getting them to recognize this.
    2) Coaxing out the pain points.
    3) Bypassing their bureaucracy (chain of command).

How do you find out what problems the business has?

Large business also means supporting old stuff. You can stop dreaming of HTML5 and start coding stuff working in IE7. Also, weirdo DMZ, weirdo User Right, weirdo proxy settings, ...

It is complicated, you have little clients that each represent a significant fraction of your revenue. They will pay well but drain your development team in pointless, unportable, customisations.

Large businesses is not a sexy world and companies catering their need are similarly not sexy.

People upvote it because it because (a) product beta launches are rightly HN fodder and (b) it saves the story in your account so it serves as a "I'm busy now I'll try this tonight".

Little bit offtopic: recently every startup website I've seen here looks almost exactly the same, especially those with .io domain. Is there some kind of a template or technology that is being used to fastly develop those or is this just a trend?If it is could someone link to some resources about how to create those? Thanks.

I'd also ask about those videos—they tend to be quite neat. I wonder which studios do that (are there many?) and for how much approximately.

+1, does anyone know what software is primarily used to produce this kind of videos?

I asked a friend, he says they can be using Adobe After Effects (his preference) or Final Cut Pro. I was surprised, but apparently these tools are fit to do this kind of animation.

The narrative can be a more difficult part, unless the video involves much custom graphics (this one appears to do a decent job reusing a few primitives). By narrative I mean not just the voice, which I was told is often done by outsourcing to studios out there, but the script in general.

Just my 2 cents, maybe someone can give more info.

This seems like a potentially useful app but I don't see how I get started using it. I don't want to start inviting everyone I know. I still need Skype, Basecamp and email running while I work as well. I still need whatsapp, viber, Facebook & Google hangouts on my phone + sms and regular calling on my phone. Everyone seems to have a different way of contacting me.

If this could be an sms or email client or if it could pull in 2-3 of those services I might start using it. Seems nicer than most of them.

For now I'm just hoping I don't have 2-3 people that want to fleep me instead of Skype. I have enough places I can accidentally overlook a bit of text from someone I know.

...i don't want another chat solution at this point. it doesn't matter what you offer me or do different.

I like how Flowdock does this. Using threads (or flows) within the same chatroom have really helped our organisation communicate better.

Our development team moved from Campfire to Hipchat, and then from Hipchat to Flowdock, afterwards we created rooms for the other departments as an expirement, and we couldn't be happier.

No more URGENT emails, or direct interruptions, its all there in the chat.

Can I host it?

This!

There are so many of these things but "Can I host it?" Is the one thing that I don't know of a solution that allows it. Seems like we need an open source one.

I just posted a similar comment above. It seems like the time is right for an open source advanced chat server. Maybe there already is one, I just don't know of it yet.

I've never used it but it looks like it might be what you are looking for: https://github.com/kandanapp/kandan

Very cool, I'm looking into this. Thanks!

We've been using Slack at work and we haven't turned back.

We just started using Slack a couple of weeks ago. Pretty good so far

...or you could just use IRC

my co-worker and i use kato.im for this kind of thing. fleep looks nice, but it doesn't highlight source code, which is kind of a deal breaker for us.

We've been using Slack, you should check it out.

Feels like Google Wave.

What about Flowdock?

Lot of time wasted reinventing the wheel.

another one?

How does this compete with poot and fweeep?

(sorry)

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