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Comment by Blahah | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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

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