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My friend and I were working on a tool for this when the pandemic started and our jobs went remote. It was a fun exercise and we learned a lot about webrtc and
by raymondgh 4y ago
My friend and I were working on a tool for this when the pandemic started and our jobs went remote. It was a fun exercise and we learned a lot about webrtc and audio/video APIs. But we noticed there was a new startup every other week raising some funds to do the same thing and working much harder than us on the problem. Finally, Slack announced “huddles” and we gave in to the fatigue we had with some peer negotiation issue & dropped the project. Now, 2 years later, none of those tools have blown up. I feel pretty confident that tools aren’t the solution to the missing pop-in; culture is. Teams that want this capability have been figuring it out one way or another just like this example. Even myself: a decade ago I would work one-on-one on something and we’d sit in a Skype call, both muted doing our own things, music playing, but able to poke the other with extremely low friction. It was great. Nowadays with hybrid work and the momentum of in-person culture, I think a lot of people are unable to appreciate remote work as much as possible. IMO the pop-in can be an important part of the remote puzzle.
- dwrtz 4y agoSorry to hear you stopped working on your tool. My cofounder and I are working on a similar product (teraphone.app). We're focusing specifically on making a discord-like product for microsoft shops. I agree it's partly a culture thing. There's also an awareness issue. A lot of people don't know that pop-in style communication tools exist, especially outside the tech industry.
- GordonS 4y agoInteresting, do you think you have a chance at competing against Microsoft's own tools, like Teams? Regardless how crappy Teams is at certain things, the people that decide "we're using Teams" often barely use it themselves.
- texasbigdata 4y agoLook at Microsoft buying sunrise, even though the server based calendar outlook feature was arguably fully fledged. There’s always space:
- dwrtz 4y agoYeah we decided to integrate with Teams because I had that exact experience in the past. I was at a company that decided "we're using Teams". We weren't allowed to install alternatives like Discord or Slack. Teams itself has some limitations that are easy to improve upon. They have no way of doing a huddle/pop-in-style room. They screw up the presence signaling in a way that discourages pop-ins: if you join a call with someone your and the other participants' status is set to busy/unavailable. From other peoples' perspective this isn't very inviting, and doesn't indicate that the conversation is public. Teams also limits who can share screens to only 1 person at a time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]