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Chats are not dead yet
- Kwpolska 15y agoThanks, but I'll stay with IRC and irssi.
- slowpoke 15y agoAwesome Features! Beautiful default theme Join multiple rooms and start private conversations Get notified when new messages arrive Ignore spammers and people you don't like Moderation: Kick and ban users, change the subject of the room Um. So basically, they just reinvented IRC, based it on an XMPP backend and spiced it up with a load of funky buzzwords?
- erikpukinskis 15y agoExcept that only techies are able to use IRC. You can throw this on a web server and anyone will be able to use it. You could use it for your church chat room or something.
- slowpoke 15y agoEr, no. That's like saying Linux is only CLI. It's outdated misinformation. There are loads of web clients, and you wouldn't believe what kinds of tech illiterate people I've seen on some networks.
- kaylarose 15y agoI can't tell the difference between IM and IRC in Adium. It's the best non-IRC, IRC client.
- ciupicri 15y agoPidgin is another multi-protocol popular option.
- click170 15y agoDoes Pidgin do IRC? I didn't think it did. I wanted to switch to Pidgin a while back because it had support for the kind of encryption I wanted (public key) and Adium didn't, but I ended up not doing it and I thought the reason was because Pidgin doesn't do IRC. Am I misinformed?
- StavrosK 15y agoI just checked to make sure, it does. I think it's had it for years, too.
- saurik 15y agoYep: Pidgen has supported IRC so long that back when I was still using it, and the project hadn't yet been renamed from Gaim, it already supported it; it had a few stupidities, and didn't support userhost-masks for buddy bindings (something that simply "makes sense" if you use IRC enough), but it definitely worked and still does (I have friends who use it all the time for IRC, and one who even contributes patches to it).
- sciurus 15y agoIRC is listed as a supported protocol on the front page of http://www.pidgin.im/ http://www.pidgin.im/
- krakensden 15y agoThe Pidgin developers are also the libpurple developers- if Adium supports it, so does Pidgin.
- onedognight 15y agoThis hasn't always gone the other way however. Adium finally added support for IRC recently, though pidgin and libpurple have had it for years.
- Terretta 15y ago
- ellyagg 15y agoIt's funny that your parent is downvoted below zero when he's absolutely right. I don't use IRC very much, but the last time I did, I wanted to use the name I'd registered with previously. Unfortunately, Pidgin kept telling me my name was already in use or some crap. It was quite difficult at the time, not being an initiate in the appropriate vocabulary, to figure out the search terms to use to discover that I needed to "ghost" the user or some ridiculous unintuitive incantation. I may have got the details wrong, but that only confirms my point. IRC is too hard for non-techies. I'm a programmer by profession, and if it gives me the slightest hassle, it's too hard for other people. Maybe a nice client could make this pain go away, but I doubt it. All the ones I've tried have suffered from the same learning curve problem and the same in-grained assumptions that come from regular use of IRC. Even if one were easy and elegant, I'm not sure that could overcome the negative network effects of so many clients, billed as IRC, doing it badly. I'm not going to analyze it in detail right now, but there's myriad subtracting reinforcements from a community that mostly uses user-unfriendly clients and protocols. You can't just make one good client and get a tipping point. In fact, desktop linux does look like a good analogy here. Moreover, it would be disingenuous to claim that IRC being techie-unfriendly is "outdated" when the majority of clients and tech how-tos pointing to clients are the same as they ever were. I would guess that the majority of IRC use is still done on unfriendly clients, e.g., Pidgin. One or two low share clients existing don't speak for IRC. Now, I'm not saying XMPP or this client is an answer. But, yes, IRC is and always will be unpopular with the non-tech population.
- temphn 15y agoYou are absolutely right and I have no idea why you are being downvoted. When is the last time anyone has done IRC in the browser? What this widget does is potentially bring Facebook Chat or Gmail style Chat to your site. That's worthwhile.
- mtogo 15y agoMibbit is actually pretty good if you want to chat on IRC via a web browser.
- darklajid 15y agoI don't get it. XMPP already has everything IRC has. - Federation - Multiple (persistent) rooms (Look up XMPP Groupchat) - Permissions (think chanserv, /mode +ov etc.) - Private messages What am I missing? I'm hanging out on IRC every day, on multiple networks. No, I don't use XMPP groupchat so far - just to counter that argument. The reason for that is, that - XMPP clients usually suck in that area, in my opinion. So the protocol would be fine for me and I'd like to see IM tied in with groupchat/channels, but really.. Look at the clients and it's like really, really crappy IRC clients (to get back to your point: Yes, those UIs are usually following IRC designs, just with look like from a decade in the past) - Adoption. For company internal stuff XMPP is great. If someone with high profile (GTalk? Facebook Chat?) would build a product based on this protocol, it would boost the adoption tremendously. On the other hand, as I stated a couple of days earlier in another XMPP discussion: As long as Google or Facebook are not supporting federation, they are not really supporting the core feature of XMPP in my book. Did they reinvent IRC? No, XMPP did. Years ago, it's an XMPP standard. This is just an IRC client look-alike that doesn't suck completely.
- hamidpalo 15y agoFB and GTalk DO use XMPP. I also imagine that AIM, MSN, and Skype all have some sort of a XMPP implementation as well since they all can talk to FB.
- darklajid 15y agoYou misread my post - or I was just not clear enough. I KNOW that they use XMPP. That's why I listed them. But both don't (as far as I know) support the multi user chat extension, the whole point of my answer. What I wanted to say was this: I don't use the MUC in XMPP (a lot) instead of IRC, because it's just not used anywhere. Google, Facebook, could hopefully "just" add it to their existing chat infrastructure. Better?
- pyre 15y agoIIRC Google does support federation. At least with Google Apps for Domains, you can add some records to your DNS that enable federation for your domain.
- temphn 15y agoDon't get the negativity. Is there a Javascript-API scriptable, browser-based IRC client out there?
- Skiptar 15y agoIt looks lovely and pretty, but does seem like they're trying to re-invent the wheel.
- darklajid 15y agoDisclaimer: I have no ties to the project, no idea if I can find a use for it myself. But I somehow feel the need to defend them against this 'reinvent the wheel' thing. No, they don't. If that project makes any sense at all (the 'Under the hood' page only defines what they used to build the frontend, not what the backend is) they are using http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html on the server. Quoting: "This specification defines an XMPP protocol extension for multi-user text chat, whereby multiple XMPP users can exchange messages in the context of a room or channel, similar to Internet Relay Chat (IRC). In addition to standard chatroom features such as room topics and invitations, the protocol defines a strong room control model, including the ability to kick and ban users, to name room moderators and administrators, to require membership or passwords in order to join the room, etc." So - yeah. XMPP 'reinvented' this. First version is from 2002.. So these guys try to build a good and extensible UI for a feature that is available for a long time. Let's judge them by that, not by our 'get off my lawn, IRC is good enough' attitude. Now, if we look at node.js chat examples.. Those are usually reinventing IRC (but again, those are trying to demo technology or build a good web client. Criticizing the protocol wouldn't make that much sense for these projects either, imo).
- erikpukinskis 15y agoThis is awesome. I just wish it was a hosted service. Somewhat regularly I want to do an online group chat with some people, and there's no good way to do it. Yeah, you could spend hours trying to get Skype installed on everyone's machine, or teach people how to use IRC (yeah right). But with a nice hosted chat service, I could just click a button, and send everyone a URL and be done with it. I'm surprised no one has gone after this use case. I would even potentially pay a couple bucks for a "day pass" or whatever. Convore could've gone in this direction, but their signup process is too onerous. I don't want to have to walk five people in my family through signing up for their service just to get a chat going.
- dexen 15y agoThere is a very-well developed multi-person JS chat: http://www.mibbit.com/ http://www.mibbit.com/ With great cross-browser compatibility and rich functionality like file uploads and in-line previews you can't go wrong. Uses certain well established IM transport protocol that plays nice with your text-mode IM client ;-) Yes, you can embed it on your website. Either ad-supported or paid-for.
- moe 15y agoIt seems you missed the part where he said "teach people how to use IRC (yeah right)". The frontpage of mibbit is an instant "close-tab" to a non-nerd user.
- slowpoke 15y agoYou can just link directly to a server/chatroom on mibbit. No need for your users to ever see their frontpage.
- moe 15y agoTheir chat-interface isn't better either. Honestly, would you send a mibbit link in a professional context to an non-nerd contact? Well, that was a rhetoric question... The colors are terrible, the whole thing looks like a relic from the 90s and there's way too much tech exposed.
- pornel 15y agoHaving demo run in the "screenshot" is a really cool idea.
- evilpie 15y agoCan i please get the same UI/feeling, but with an IRC backend, no need to reinvent that. Aalso the irc protcol is kinda weird and bloated with extensions.
- true_religion 15y agoIf the IRC protocol is bloated, then why use it?
- metabrew 15y agoi'm doing something like this at https://irccloud.com/ https://irccloud.com/
- timmfin 15y agoSuprised no one has yet brought up the obvious comparison to campfirenow.com and hipchat.com. While being free and self host-able is nice, the Candy UI seems light years behind its for pay competitors. But I'm glad to see more options available. I've been advocating web-based chat in my offices for quite a while now, and am happy that a few decent choices have finally started to pop up in the past couple years.
- chrischen 15y agoI agree it would be better if they just focused on this being used for building chat into apps, rather than being ready out of the box as a chat widget.
- mweibel 15y agoThe good thing about Candy: You can extend it with plugins and customize the interface, both very easy. If you'd like more features - do it!
- Stratego 15y agoAm I the only one here wishing for some persistence?
- Flam 15y agoThey should take a look at http://qwebirc.org/ http://qwebirc.org/
- dmd 15y agoWhat I really miss is character-at-a-time chat, a la unix 'talk/ntalk/ytalk' or VMS 'PHONE'. It created an intimacy you can't get with line-at-a-time solution, and there is, as far as I know, NO modern replacement for it - literally no way at all to do this any more other than actually setting up and using talk and talkd. It's sort of possible to emulate it using something like etherpad, but it's really not at all the same.
- aristidb 15y agoWave was like that. :-)
- dmd 15y agoIt wasn't, though - updates were 'chunky' - you'd type a few words, and the other person would see them all appear at once. Even that little bit of loss of real-time destroys the illusion of a shared space.
- jamesgeck0 15y agoGoogle Docs used to be like that, but Wave was capable of character-by-character updates. You would see updates in larger chunks if latency was high enough, but I've participated in several waves where I could see characters appearing one to three at a time.
- StavrosK 15y agoYou can (could?) do it with ICQ, it had an option.
- darklajid 15y agoInteresting. I never thought of this feature as 'intimate'. Most of the time I was annoyed, seeing the other one type o n e c h a r a t a t i m e I prefer waiting for a full line, that (hopefully) makes sense. And I try to convince myself that the person I'm chatting with right now isn't slow as molasses, he just takes a moment of time to think before typing a well-considered reply.
- sciurus 15y agoCould this easily be adapted for chats between the webpage visitor and a single other, predetermined user rather than many-user chatrooms? I've been looking for a web-embeddable open source chat client that could be used to power a support feature of a website.
- mweibel 15y agoWell, you can try to do that. But it's focused on multi-user chatting. Maybe another software would be a better fit.
- earnubs 15y agoSee also: http://www.irccloud.com/ http://www.irccloud.com/
- penetrarthur 15y agoCTRL+F -> IRC -> no results -> ctrl+w
- subnetvj 15y agoSeems like a chat client for geeks(i.e. we HN frequenters). Well, just looking at there setup section!! But as already said in other comments, there's nothing new. The title could have been "chats are not dead yet, but innovative new chat tool are"
- astral303 15y agoThis seems great for a persisent group chat! The chat client is in the browser and I automatically seem to get persistence. Seems nice.
- evanw 15y agoI wonder if they plan to support Nginx in the future? > To run the example you'll also need Apache HTTP server with the following modules enabled: mod_rewrite, mod_proxy and mod_proxy_http.
- mweibel 15y agoYou can also use nginx. I don't know about nginx supporting url rewritings, but basicly you just need that for rewriting http-bind/ to your jabber server's http-bind
- firedev 15y agohttp://jaconda.im http://jaconda.im is #1 for developer team chat. We use its integration with git and issue tracker. Has XMPP, persistent and basically the shit.
- dreamdu5t 15y agoLook, it's hipchat!
- alnayyir 15y agoOnly non-coders think chat is dead. We still live on IRC.