Slack Chats
slackchats.com
slackchats.com
This is currently 2nd, and is written with the idea of helping people form communities on top of a proprietary system.
Slack seems like it might be a good thing for companies, but for public stuff, I'll continue to stick with IRC.
I'll add: this site seems like a cool idea and good work by whoever created it, but I'm just averse to building on that particular foundation.
And $5/month per user for the team plan would quickly add up! So irccloud for work would simply be too expensive; and that's just the client. Private IRC server (as a service) won't be cheap either. Or could run it myself but then I'd also have to maintain it myself.
Slack hits the sweet spot. There's nothing to maintain, the barrier to entry for non-technical people is low. The apps are great and so is the web version. It evokes the feeling of IRC and adds convenience of instant messaging (e.g. @-mentions, notifications; irccloud does mentions and notifications too which makes it really good).
So yeah, Slack is a cage, but a golden one. With a comfortable plush sofa and freshly brewed coffee. I can hang out there with friends and do some work...
UI improvements are coming up to make the most IRC actions usable via the UI which will make a huge improvement over many IRC options out there.
Disclaimer: I'm a Kiwi IRC dev.
-No single point of failure.
-No dependency on a different company for a vital points of your business.
-No private info stored on a 3rd party system, in a different state and potentially a different country (legal nightmare to ask for damages).
-Distributed system. Local servers give lower lag for multisite companies, internet access outage means netsplit, not inability to communicate.
-Already existing indexing and searching features if desired.
-Many bots to automate/notify/interact with insane amounts of stuff.
-Thousands of IRC clients, with enormous customizing features, for every conceivable platform, that do as much and even more than all these "this is how communication should be" solutions.
-Bridging IRC to XMPP/Sametime/etc plugins/apps to interoperate with other companies.
I can sort of understand Slack for a small company, but if you have your own server infrastructure, no, I can't.
If you have absolutely nothing better to do with your time, it's a great idea to do this yourself.
For the rest of us who are actually trying to grow businesses rather than set up IRC servers, there's HipChat and Slack.
For something purely internal for a company, that makes sense to me. It's the public, 'general interest' kinds of things where I'd avoid building on something proprietary if possible.
Seems like a good place to mention, on Freenode:
* #startups - pretty informal and sometimes a lot of noise with little signal, but occasionally something good, too.
* #bootstrappers - a channel I'm trying to get going. Not much there yet!
> For the rest of us who are actually trying to grow businesses rather than set up IRC servers, there's HipChat and Slack.
For the rest of us who are actually trying to grow businesses rather than set up <insert company IT infrastructure> there's this <insert proprietary platform>.
I've heard that before from people who don't blink to have their own Gitlab/Bugzilla/Jenkins/Whatever. It's overly short sighted to dedicate resources for development support IT infrastructure, but consider resources for development communication a waste of time.
I've found Openfire + Spark IM to be a reasonable alternative sitting between the customizable and the convenient, and it's open source.
For that matter I always wondered why someone can't do the same with git and watching files, instead of proprietary clients like dropbox.
You might want to have a look at git-annex (assistant or otherwise, I use both) http://git-annex.branchable.com/
> I can sort of understand Slack for a small company, but if you have your own server infrastructure, no, I can't.
This seems to be based on the assumption that IRC is anywhere near as feature-rich as a web-based chat client, but it isn't. If you could point me to an OS X IRC client that isn't absolutely terrible (and please do, I'd really love one), I'd be happy to give it a shot, but even with all of the above perceived advantages of IRC, Flowdock still wins for me. Every team I've worked on that's switched to it has had a marked uptick in productivity.
It also has a higher barrier of entry, since you have to find and likely install a client, find a server to connect that client to, and know what channels to join in order to find conversation (assuming your IT policy isn't blocking IRC ports, and the irc server doesn't require ident auth). Most IRC client UIs are still inspired by irssi, high in utility and information density, but low in glamor. Monospaced fonts are typically the default.
Slack doesn't require any of these things, you click a button on a website, enter your name, and are put right into general chat. The UI is carefully designed and aesthetically pleasing. Since entire groups are topic specific, you don't have to go looking for the specific room you want. Slack removes the burden of choice.
There's not enough being done to resolve this problem for IRC. IrcCloud has tried to solve the client problem, putting it all in a browser, eliminating the networking aspect, and making the UI as pleasing as they can, but there's nothing to be done for the discovery issue that doesn't also hamstring IRC power users.
Definitely love Slack for team communication but I don't think it would work as well for public chat.
Top post on there right now:
A quick note from Jeff Morris Jr. (founder of Slack Chats):
Slack Chats was created to help you meet interesting new people.
We are not created by, affiliated with, or supported by Slack
Technologies, Inc. Thanks for your awesome support! :)
Worse yet, this is building negative brand recognition for Slack Technologies at the moment, as the UI polish isn't what we'd expect from the Slack team, and their page isn't keeping up w/ HN traffic.
Jeff Morris Jr. here (founder of Slack Chats).
I've spoken with the Slack Team and they are big fans of this product. In fact, I've had several team members email me to thank me for building this product.
I included the note as the top post to clearly state that this isn't an official Slack product.
The site drives traffic to Slack and I do not make a single dollar off of it (despite many offers from advertisers).
Hope this helps!
Jeff
[1] http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/24/slack-is-quietly-un...
Again, I am not an employee of Slack and do not want to speculate but that's my best guess.
> I asked the company how it felt about these communities popping up even though it’s not exactly sanctioned and a press relations person told me that “it’s great that people are putting Slack to good use” but unfortunately “these communities are not something we have the capacity to support given the growth in our existing business.”
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/24/slack-is-quietly-un...
I would say "using other people's names in confusing ways that border on impersonation should maybe be illegal", but of course it is: Slack is definitely popular enough in this space to deserve implicit trademark status. (And, before someone invokes the standard whine of "you can't own a word like Slack", trademarks are not about "owning words": they are about protecting people—the people who see the word, not the people who use the word—from being deceived, either on purpose or on accident, by someone using a name within the same highly-restricted context in a way that is confusing.)
(edit: I am glad to see benjamincburns also noted this in his comment elsewhere on this post. I noticed his comment after I had written my comment, and I figured I provide some useful detail on this not even being a sanctioned use, so I decided to leave my additional comment. He is also soon a great service now of replying to some of the people to clear up confusion.)
I think this is a textbook example of trademark infringement all wrapped up in a nice neat little package. It shows how brand protection shouldn't really care about the intent of the infringing party. It's so overt I'd have to assume it was due to naivety, but that doesn't make it any less damaging.
The fact that it just doesn't "feel" like a service that might follow from the team who brought us Slack-the-team-chat-product just serves to establish Slack Technologies' ownership of their brand, and their need to protect it. If their marketing and PM teams have seen this, I'm sure they're cringing.
That's not to say that it doesn't offer value. I'm sure that if the branding issue wasn't so overt, we'd all be cheering it on as a Show HN style MVP.
Thanks for the note. This is Jeff (I started Slack Chats).
As mentioned above, the team at Slack has been very positive about the project. I've been in touch with their marketing team to make sure we are transparent about our "non affiliation" to Slack.
This was very much a 24 hour project and has been very positive for building new communities on Slack.
Appreciate the feedback,
Jeff
If one needs to be invited, is that a standard process the visitor can initiate?
This is frustrating for me, an iOS dev wanting to join the iosdevelopers slack, because it requires an invite, and I'm a solo dev. So, though I have apps with millions of downloads and a decent amount of iOS dev experience, I don't really have anyone I know in the community.
And it is abuse. From the company itself: "these communities are not something we have the capacity to support given the growth in our existing business." [1]
[1] http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/03/24/slack-is-quietly-un...
Define "better". For many people, Slack is easier to use, has a better UI, and is better supported on mobile devices.
If it was a stupid concept to start with I'd understand sceptism. But new takes on top of IRC seems a good idea, and from the time I spend chatting on my projects, I'd welcome a solution that would bring even 10% more efficiency to the current process.
Shameless plug: If you use Slack on Chrome my Chrome Extension, #Clicky, may be of some use to you, it's the fastest way to share your current page to Slack!
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clicky-for-slack/b...
I cannot find one on that domain, but I wonder if it's the same as the one on Slack.com https://slack.com/privacy-policy .
That policy isn't aimed at protection of end user data, but rather at compliance with regulations around corporate communications.
Not the same company. See my other post(s).
I think the reason this is getting so much traction on HN is because of a false association.