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Comment by mrshoe | Hacker News Reader

As all of us chatters and instant messengers grow up and enter the "real world", we are realizing that those forms of communication and collaboration can be really useful at work.

Unfortunately, the usual reaction is to get everyone in your office on yahoo/aim/gchat/msn messenger, which is far from ideal.

I think this space is bound to see quite a bit of growth in the near future, and it's far from a solved problem. That's why we're building http://shoptalkapp.com :)

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You might look into the possibility of a deploy-able version targeting corporations that don't want to keep data like that in the cloud.

While this might add considerably to support expenses, it might also be a pretty good way to tap into a niche market?

What makes this different from Campfire or group chat in Gtalk?

It's quite a bit different from group chat in Gtalk. The biggest difference is that the rooms are persistent and any time you log in you can scroll back to catch up on missed conversations. With Gtalk (or any IM service) group chats are usually ad-hoc and treated more like meetings: you start one, talk for a while, then close it. The idea here is to have a constant stream and have topic- or team-oriented rooms where people can always go to ask questions or get ideas from their coworkers.

It is, however, very similar to Campfire. Right now, the advantages over Campfire include performance (which is actually quite key for real-time conversations like this), and the ability to sit in multiple rooms at once and receive notifications about messages to you in background rooms (also pretty important, we've found). That said, we're in beta! So, we definitely plan on differentiating ourselves more in the coming months.

That is pretty similar to how a few starts i've worked at have treated skype. Unread message counts are analogous to the bg chat thing you mention, you can also get the scroll-back.

Please make a non-web client -- maybe an air app, even.

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