4 ms·

Persistence. It's nice to be able to see what conversations you missed while offline or overnight, especially if you have teammates distributed across the globe

Persistence. It's nice to be able to see what conversations you missed while offline or overnight, especially if you have teammates distributed across the globe. Persistence also allows you to search through or link people to old conversations.

IgorPartola 12y ago
So XMPP lets you do this too. Why invent a new protocol?
- brown9-2 12y ago
  Because a company feels there is money to be made by offering a simpler solution to interested customers. Does every product really need a technical justification? If every person at your company is comfortable setting up email clients, IRC bots, and bouncers, then this isn't a product for you. If you would rather just pay someone $2/person/month to set this up for you, then this is the product for you.
  - IgorPartola 12y ago
    It needs some kind of justification, otherwise it will die. HipChat being offered for free may extend it's life, but I still don't see a point. Everyone has access to GChat, so 99% of the problems are already solved. The dev shops would probably rather use IRC especially since the experience for power users is so terrible. That does not leave room for HipChat in this world.
    - uxp 12y ago
      My company just moved from a GChat-centric XMPP system to an all-in HipChat system. We don't have Google Apps because we have our own Exchange server, so not everyone gets a sane email address that can also be used as their GChat handle, so we've all relegated to using personal or work-specific personal Gmail accounts. Just last week we onboarded a new developer and instead of having to spread her personal GChat address all over the company and make sure that everyone has authorized her to speak to them, and worked out the kinks for the few (like me) who run their own XMPP server that play russian roulette on whether Google is going to allow federation today... we just sent her a link to a URL which allowed her to create a user and immediately started downloading a client that once authenticated, connected her to the entire company. Granted, we could have used our internal IRC server (we actually do have one set up), but the maintenance behind it really started to get to us. In order to use it we had to VPN in and connect, and backlog wasn't available to people that aren't technical enough to understand shell clients (like our project managers). When we did decide to open up the security permissions we had spam bots connecting 24/7 trying to get into our channel, which we then had to password protect, which ended up being another piece of tribal knowledge that "you just had to know". Still, I continue to have Campfire (Flint.app), HipChat, Adium with XMPP for OTR, Google Hangouts for multi-person conferencing, Email, irssi and Twitter open all day. I wish I could consolodate them all into one, but I can't because they all have specific use cases. If HipChat was to allow an OTR plugin and multi-person video chats and screen sharing, that'd get rid of 4 of my communications^W daily distractions, but it wouldn't get rid of all of them because they serve different purposes. At the very least, HipChat being free is a much better argument against using Lync now.
idle_processor 12y ago
Overnight is covered by leaving a client running, with logging. Offline is covered by using a BNC[0]. These solutions are years old, but perhaps less user-friendly than hipchat. There are a plethora of IRC clients to choose from one various platforms, but there's only the one hipchat. IRC is also an open protocol. So, hipchat's only real chance is trying to be the Apple of IRC--they must nail UX and marketing to the tech-hapless to have a real chance. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_(software)
- eddieroger 12y ago
  That's pseudo-persistence, and it's only as stable as the client or bouncer. HipChat and Slack provide actual, stateless history, so you can reboot, logout, sign in from a mobile device, whatever, and pick up where you left off, with notifications in the meanwhile.
- 15thandwhatever 12y ago
  irc is great for a company that consists solely of developers + devops who've been bearding it up for 10+ years. however, for the rest of the world, if you work with a non-dev team (think sales, marketing, customer support), you will really frustrate them when you tell them: "the question you just asked was answered at 3am last night, if you just scrollback..." ...god forbid you lose power (like san francisco in a heat wave last week) or you could just choose to really frustrate your IT person(s) by telling them they need to install and maintain irc clients + bncs across multiple operating systems for your users, that automatically start up and join the right channels when the user logs in. or you could just frustrate all of your mobile users by draining their battery (and potentially their data plan) by telling them to stay connected to irc 24/7 from their phones via a mobile irc client, or hold a companywide training session on how to install an ssh client + screen-reattach + navigate irssi from a touchscreen phone. or you could further frustrate your users by telling them irssi includes search as long as they learn the syntax of /lastlog. i'm not even going to touch screenshots. user-friendly > neckbeard. pay the $X/mo per user for slack/hipchat -versus- paying $XX to $XXX/hour per user to provide them with the requisite knowledge foundation and ongoing support to use your arcane chat methodology that hates noobs.
ams6110 12y ago
We've had chat + persistence for decades, and called it email (or perhaps usenet or listserv, for groups).

IgorPartola 12y ago

So XMPP lets you do this too. Why invent a new protocol?

brown9-2 12y ago
Because a company feels there is money to be made by offering a simpler solution to interested customers. Does every product really need a technical justification? If every person at your company is comfortable setting up email clients, IRC bots, and bouncers, then this isn't a product for you. If you would rather just pay someone $2/person/month to set this up for you, then this is the product for you.
- IgorPartola 12y ago
  It needs some kind of justification, otherwise it will die. HipChat being offered for free may extend it's life, but I still don't see a point. Everyone has access to GChat, so 99% of the problems are already solved. The dev shops would probably rather use IRC especially since the experience for power users is so terrible. That does not leave room for HipChat in this world.
  - uxp 12y ago
    My company just moved from a GChat-centric XMPP system to an all-in HipChat system. We don't have Google Apps because we have our own Exchange server, so not everyone gets a sane email address that can also be used as their GChat handle, so we've all relegated to using personal or work-specific personal Gmail accounts. Just last week we onboarded a new developer and instead of having to spread her personal GChat address all over the company and make sure that everyone has authorized her to speak to them, and worked out the kinks for the few (like me) who run their own XMPP server that play russian roulette on whether Google is going to allow federation today... we just sent her a link to a URL which allowed her to create a user and immediately started downloading a client that once authenticated, connected her to the entire company. Granted, we could have used our internal IRC server (we actually do have one set up), but the maintenance behind it really started to get to us. In order to use it we had to VPN in and connect, and backlog wasn't available to people that aren't technical enough to understand shell clients (like our project managers). When we did decide to open up the security permissions we had spam bots connecting 24/7 trying to get into our channel, which we then had to password protect, which ended up being another piece of tribal knowledge that "you just had to know". Still, I continue to have Campfire (Flint.app), HipChat, Adium with XMPP for OTR, Google Hangouts for multi-person conferencing, Email, irssi and Twitter open all day. I wish I could consolodate them all into one, but I can't because they all have specific use cases. If HipChat was to allow an OTR plugin and multi-person video chats and screen sharing, that'd get rid of 4 of my communications^W daily distractions, but it wouldn't get rid of all of them because they serve different purposes. At the very least, HipChat being free is a much better argument against using Lync now.

idle_processor 12y ago

Overnight is covered by leaving a client running, with logging. Offline is covered by using a BNC[0]. These solutions are years old, but perhaps less user-friendly than hipchat. There are a plethora of IRC clients to choose from one various platforms, but there's only the one hipchat. IRC is also an open protocol. So, hipchat's only real chance is trying to be the Apple of IRC--they must nail UX and marketing to the tech-hapless to have a real chance. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_(software)

eddieroger 12y ago
That's pseudo-persistence, and it's only as stable as the client or bouncer. HipChat and Slack provide actual, stateless history, so you can reboot, logout, sign in from a mobile device, whatever, and pick up where you left off, with notifications in the meanwhile.
15thandwhatever 12y ago
irc is great for a company that consists solely of developers + devops who've been bearding it up for 10+ years. however, for the rest of the world, if you work with a non-dev team (think sales, marketing, customer support), you will really frustrate them when you tell them: "the question you just asked was answered at 3am last night, if you just scrollback..." ...god forbid you lose power (like san francisco in a heat wave last week) or you could just choose to really frustrate your IT person(s) by telling them they need to install and maintain irc clients + bncs across multiple operating systems for your users, that automatically start up and join the right channels when the user logs in. or you could just frustrate all of your mobile users by draining their battery (and potentially their data plan) by telling them to stay connected to irc 24/7 from their phones via a mobile irc client, or hold a companywide training session on how to install an ssh client + screen-reattach + navigate irssi from a touchscreen phone. or you could further frustrate your users by telling them irssi includes search as long as they learn the syntax of /lastlog. i'm not even going to touch screenshots. user-friendly > neckbeard. pay the $X/mo per user for slack/hipchat -versus- paying $XX to $XXX/hour per user to provide them with the requisite knowledge foundation and ongoing support to use your arcane chat methodology that hates noobs.

ams6110 12y ago

We've had chat + persistence for decades, and called it email (or perhaps usenet or listserv, for groups).