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Slack will soon start testing voice and video chat
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- zootam 11y agoi'm not surprised
- Mandatum 11y agoThis has been in the pipeline since they bought Screenhero. I think they're just fully integrating it now.
- faitswulff 11y agoI have high hopes for it, then. ScreenHero remains my favorite screensharing application. Among my circles, its usage has been growing even though you can now only register an account by invitation.
- Mandatum 11y agoI can only hope the integrated version is >= ScreenHero.
- jeremy_k 11y agoAgreed. I actually hope it provides the screen sharing capability with the possibility of video also. There are tons of non-developers that I always feel like I wish I could just Screenhero them and show them something, but having a random person take over your computer can be a little jarring.
- spearo77 11y agoAre the "dips" in the chart[0] where corporate customers are on vacation? [0]: https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/slack-growth.jpg?w=680&h=438 https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/slack-g...
- jwomers 11y agoYes they are - I've seen another version of that chart and it was annotated with those dips being holidays.
- fraserharris 11y agoSpecifically, Christmas' of 2014 & 2015.
- api 11y agoI wonder if they will do p2p video chat... since Skype abandoned p2p the quality is notably awful.
- emp 11y agoI thought the removal of P2P was due to a patent: https://www.google.com/patents/US6108704 https://www.google.com/patents/US6108704
- striking 11y agoThey never truly abandoned it, but most connections are served through dedicated servers now. http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s...
- abrookewood 11y agoThe reason for the move to dedicated servers (AFAIK) was because without it, they couldn't really do offline messages. Once WhatsApp etc started doing this, the Skype team realised that their greatest strength (no paying for bandwidth or servers etc) was actually their greatest weakness, since they couldn't deliver the features that people had begun to expect from chat apps. There was a great article on this .. but I can't find it.
- api 11y agoYou can do both.
- api 11y agoIsn't that expired now? And if it covers p2p it's ridiculous. All PSNs are prior art
- awqrre 11y agoI thought that was to allow Microsoft to be able to comply with government requests...
- ljk 11y agogreat... https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- sniuff 11y agoWhat they also really need is being able to manage all slack servers you are in. Something like what discord has.
- Ensorceled 11y agoWe abandoned hipchat because the latest app was horrible; constant signouts, lost configurations, sso issues. Skype is also a mess right now; with chat application bugs, UX issues (why does the freakin' mute button move around) calls that can't be joined or start cyloning, participants are suddenly dropped mid call. Throw in the spying allegations ... Hangouts is great for video but is a really clunky experience otherwise. With everbody dropping the ball, there certainly is room for Slack to come in and take control of this space.
- Mandatum 11y agoI found the usability of Hipchat pretty subpar vs Slack as well. Things like editing or deleting messages, extensibility with integration, alerts and syncing across devices.. Snippets!? Come on! These should be basic, foundation features. Once you go Slack..
- scrollaway 11y agoWe're trying out Discord for work here. It's mostly targeted at gaming, but it feels far more like a "better Slack with voice chat" from my side. With that said, shoot them an email first if you want to use them at a large company ... it's not an enterprise product.
- striking 11y agoSeconding Discord. It rocks for real time communication and works very well in a browser, with rock solid native apps. And they send you really friendly emails. edit: heh. Apparently I tried posting it to HN before. Perhaps they're going a little hard on the "for gamers" branding when it could really be for anyone.
- whistlerbrk 11y agoIndeed, the React community moved from Slack to Discord. Slack has made it clear they are a tool for small teams. I don't necessarily see this announcement as a change from that.
- soupbowl 11y agoI replaced irc and slack for my group with a self hosted http://matrix.org http://matrix.org Our only complaint is no desktop client, but the web and phone clients make up for it.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- atom_enger 11y agoI'm still convinced that Hipchat was bought by Slack and the Hipchat horribleness lately is the Slack migration plan. The new client is just terrible. I asked a coworker to zip up their HipChat.app so I could revert back to a state of somewhat stability. Hopefully someone who works at Atlassian is reading this and will read: We just need to chat. I miss whatever happened to the HipChat of 2013/2014.
- xur17 11y agoI ended up downgrading https://s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.hipchat.com/osx/HipChat-3.3.7-205.zip https://s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.hipchat.com/osx/HipChat-3..., and it's been working a lot better for me. (And for verification, yes, the hipchat download link redirects to this s3 bucket: https://www.hipchat.com/downloads/latest/mac https://www.hipchat.com/downloads/latest/mac).
- vacri 11y agoHipChat definitely is Atlassian's dropped ball,... and after they saw Slack's success, they leant down to pick it up ... and accidentally kicked it away again. It's surprising just how badly they've handled that project. A pity, because I liked Hipchat's ability to show more than three comments at once, sane display of notifications, and non-rapacious pricing schedule.
- rocky1138 11y agoAm I the only one who feels like they should stick with what they're good at? Don't add too many features, bells, and whistles. Just keep building the core product.
- cloverich 11y agoI had the opposite thought -- its such a simple next step (at least, basic video chat integration is really simple with webrtc) I was wondering what they were waiting for. Without it, the door is wide open for a competitor to come in and be Slack + (on demand) Video Chat.
- taneq 11y agoWhat's that fallacy called which leads us to assume that other peoples' jobs are easy? If there are a few major players in an area and all of their offerings are terrible, is it more reasonable to conclude that they just all suck despite somehow being major players, or to conclude that it's actually a much harder problem than you think?
- MAGZine 11y agoIt's much harder to innovate than it is to copy someone's innovation. Now that Slack has pioneered good UX in the space, it's easy to rip off.
- cloverich 11y agoI only meant its an obvious next step, and until they close that loop the door is wide open for competitors. Once they do close that loop, the door becomes tiny. The only easy part would be doing a basic webrtc implementation (as they are using Chrome via Electron, and hence get the vast majority of that implementation for free). For reference, my last job was working on a web based webrtc video conferencing app in a lead role at one of the major video conferencing companies.
- tommoor 11y agoAlthough simple from a product roadmap pov it's incredibly difficult from a technical pov - no doubt the reason that they acquired a great team a year and we've still seen nothing released. It also requires a completely different set of knowledge and expertise to websockets/rest.
- bmh_ca 11y agoWe've had good luck with appear.in. The command `/appear` is even built-in to slack. That makes me curious about what their relationship is.
- lwhalen 11y agoWell, Slack did buy Screenhero not too long ago....
- tommoor 11y agoover a year ago!
- morgante 11y agoConsidering that appear.in is actually a product of Telenor (a huge Norwegian telecom), I don't think they'd be acquired. I do love appear.in though. It's amazingly seamless and reliable.
- kdkooo 11y agoI'm surprised there hasn't been more of an emphasis on creating better dashboard. One of the biggest hang-ups I experience as a user is it's too difficult to find and keep windows open for every team that I'm on that has it's own slack address. If I could sign in once and see all of the teams I'm on in one place I would be much more inclined to keep a slack tab open in my browser all the time.
- lobster_johnson 11y agoThe native (desktop and mobile) apps let you be logged into multiple teams at the same time. Each team has its own tab in the desktop version.
- macspoofing 11y agoThey should. Makes a ton of sense.
- hans 11y agoSlack for us just turns into meaningless giphy stream of consciousness for every channel, crazy town.
- hans 11y ago:] give me more giphy's :p
- wingerlang 11y agoYou can disable images from 3rd parties showing automatically.
- Flammy 11y agoWe used to be on Hipchat... moving to Slack the only thing I've missed is giphy on Slack seems much, much worse.
- EwanToo 11y agoThat sounds like a people problem, not a technical one..
- jeffrand 11y agoWe have a channel for our team to BS around in and one for more serious discussion which inevitably trends towards BS. Someone has to be an adult and tell people to quit it eventually. It's a problem with our team but not slack.
- shmerl 11y agoIt's a sad feeling that no one is working on open standard for this. XMPP/Jingle has hard time getting traction.
- richerlariviere 11y agoCommunication is not productivity. That's it. It can helps but it is not the same scope.
- Laaw 11y agoSlack has (had) some very serious security problems. So does Skype though, so whatever.
- my5thaccount 11y agoI wish slack would concentrate on making the app more productive for teams to work together remotely. We can type fast enough, in fact, hackernews tells me I'm typing too fast. The problem is organizing and collecting the information and ensuring it is useful later, rather than just during the 5 minutes. Let users break a chat message out into a threaded discussion for example. We already have plenty of voice and video chat options, we can just pick up a phone. Those things are ephemeral. Text is forever. Let's keep more of that so we can use it to further the business objectives.
- rtpg 11y agoI think that storing data in Slack is a bit of an antipattern. I'll avoid saying "You should" beacuse everyone's workflow is different, but: I like to treat Slack like e-mail. I'm also a fan of GTD(Getting Things Done), and a pretty big part of that (and things like Inbox Zero) is that _you don't leave important stuff in your inbox_. If there's some info in slack that will be valuable for more than 15 minutes, it's likely that it belongs somewhere else! When dealing with bugs, I copy the chat (well, a link to the chat) into a card in Trello. Same for basically any request that requires me to do something. I do use Slack reminders for calendar-based events. I treat Slack like I treat talking to a person in real life. If I don't write it down, I'll likely forget it, so I better write it somewhere (not in Slack) quickly. You can probably accomplish some of this with pins inside Slack, but I've never accomplished it. I think that this is one of those intractable problems where, because people work differently together and in individual workflows, it's hard to solve the "long-term coordination" problem without bogging down the "short-term coordination" problem. Anyways, text is forever, but so are newspapers on microfilm. But we still make history books.
- porker 11y agoA great point, but saving from Slack isn't the most straightforward. It's not as brainless as "Select text & hit 'Save to Evernote'" which I do in my web browsers. I've resorted to screenshots a few times, to keep the richness of the messages. > If I don't write it down, I'll likely forget it, so I better write it somewhere (not in Slack) quickly. Where do you write it?
- fensterblick 11y agoIf they can do this right, they will get a lot more customers. Right now we use Lync/Skype for communication, which I loathe almost as much as Lotus Notes. This sentiment is shared by many. Slack usage has organically grown (as a reaction to the failings of Lync) and I can envision Slack displacing Lync in many companies.
- SinomaSo 11y agoThis. I think Slack is going a new territory with voice/video. It will compete now with MS Lync and Cisco Spark. Both are eating market shares in collaboration and Slack will be affected. The two giants are investing a lot of money in their cloud based collaboration tools and might want to buy slack in the future, if it becomes a real threat.
- porker 11y agoLet's hope this has a mode like Sqwiggle, which works brilliantly for remote teams (but lacks chat as good as Slack) http://www.sqwiggle.com http://www.sqwiggle.com
- insulanian 11y agoThat graph shows the drop of cca. half a million users around the end of 2015. Is that reporting glitch or they really did loose and regain half a million users in a month?
- suls 11y agoHoliday season would explain a drop in "daily active users" wouldn't it?
- insulanian 11y agoAhh... OK then it makes sense. I understood it as total number of users they have.
- greggman 11y agoWish slack supported iframes so we could integrate live stuff like jsbin/jsfiddle/wolframalpha ...
- amelius 11y agoThis makes me wonder. How well does video-chat over WebRTC work? Are there any open-source video chat applications? I know there is icecomm.io, but it is closed source. I wonder how they handle video, and if they are doing any video processing and/or compression in javascript.
- GFischer 11y agoPlenty of open source video chat WebRTC apps. What exactly do you need? For example JITSI Meet (by the guys that are now on Hipchat, so YMMV): https://jitsi.org/Projects/JitsiMeet https://jitsi.org/Projects/JitsiMeet (MIT license) http://www.openwebrtc.org/ http://www.openwebrtc.org/ (BSD license) I think Talky is going to be open sourced too https://blog.andyet.com/2015/06/09/what-is-being-open-sourced-from-talky/ https://blog.andyet.com/2015/06/09/what-is-being-open-source... I'm working on a WebRTC-based project but it's not going to be open source :P
- amelius 11y agoThanks! I was just interested (not planning to implement anything myself soon). How does WebRTC perform in realistic scenarios? Is it capable to realistically compete with the big guys (Skype et al)?
- GFischer 11y agoToo soon to tell yet in my case, but I've been pleasantly surprised by the rapid rate of improvements, so I'd say probably yes. Skype and Hangouts are still a little better in terms of quality and overall experience, but a standard WebRTC app is definitely "good enough", and with some tweaking, it can be great (see Appear.in). And WebRTC brings some very important advantages over Skype, Hangouts, etc (mainly reduced friction, not having to login, better embeddability, and overall control of the experience) I've yet to test the new VP9 codec, which should bring huge gains. And there are other tools being added to the ecosystem which will enable lots of neat use cases.
- Hengjie 11y agoDoes anyone know what the "Search, Learning & Intelligence (SLI) division" does? It sounds onymous
- plg 11y agowhat's the status of encryption on slack? does the company hold the keys? or is it end-to-end?
- PaulRobinson 11y agoScreener's video/audio/screen-sharing tech with Slack's UX will be a good marriage, and when I heard about the acquisition I was expecting good things. Use both products at work, and Screenhero is good enough we can code in pairs remotely across Europe. Bake that right into Slack and improve the UX (because Screenhero's interface is not great in places), and it's going to be a really, really solid stack.
- neximo4 11y agoI wish they'd just make their app start up faster and improve the quality of the app. Takes nearly 15 secs to half a minute to connect, quite consistently. Would love to jump on the 'slack is awesome bandwagon', i'm already using slack. Its terrible software for the resources they have, though. I emailed them about the issue over a year and a half ago and they said they'll get to it. I guess Voice+Video>Quality
- lobster_johnson 11y agoHow often do you open the app for that to be a pain point? (FWIW, it's always been fast enough for me.)
- neximo4 11y agoI try to avoid it because its such a tease trying to get it just load up. To put things into perspective it's faster to load up Facebook with a web browser and just chat with that than to load the Mac Slack app. It's cool they have those funky loading messages but its just too slow. Might point out im in Australia and latency is a bit higher. I noticed the same thing in a few African countries. While latency is higher by a hundred or so milliseconds the loading time is significantly slower. This too on a line that is 99.4%+ better than the average. It is badly engineered. I had a look at the inner workings and first off they use a web app in a native wrapper, second their websocket negotiation process has a lot of going back and forth just to get started.