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Comment by primigenus | Hacker News Reader

Funnily enough there are actually multiple Slack-like chat app projects underway in the Meteor community. I guess building a chat app is the new building a todo list app?

Yesterday at Meteor's main meetup Devshop this was presented: http://spacetalkapp.com/ and the speaker mentioned that there's a big community effort underway to keep improving it.

Let's see which one wins the race :)

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I think chat apps are the new todo list app. Everyone is building one and frankly they are all boring and don't offer anything significant.

I tend to agree. Instant messaging seems to be dying out in the workplace. I used to find it a highly effective mode of collaboration, especially in large enterprises. Small shops seem to leave it off the list. We cranked up Slack for my team of 15 devs, but since we are co-located it didn't add any value. I guess if you were trying to make a buck off the cloud an IRC SaaS solution might look like a good idea. I don't think Freenode has to worry. :)

It doesn't hurt that Meteor is basically a chat app out of the box. Just hook up the accounts component to the DDP component and voila.

A chat application is pretty much the canonical "Hello, world!" of socket programming. No wonder it is becoming the "Hello, world!" of web sockets too.

Normally, the progression is time-server, echo-server (with timestamps, sometimes), "selective echo server" (don't reply to sender, allow multiple recipients/subscribers) -- aka "chat".

What fun is message passing if you've got no one to pass messages to, or receive messages from? And when you're doing that, you have chat! :-)

> Join SpaceTalk on Slack.

So they're not eating their own dog food?

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