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I don't understand what improvement this app is bringing. All he says is that he's disappointed in Campfire. There are more people in the comments here saying C

I don't understand what improvement this app is bringing. All he says is that he's disappointed in Campfire. There are more people in the comments here saying Campfire needs to be superseded. Why? My business uses Campfire in place of an office and it works great. We make heavy use of the api to generate notifications of completed work (like a passively updated Yammer). It's so important to me though, that I could easily be convinced to switch. But nobody seems to be able to say why I would want to. Even in the comments here, there are people talking about Mibbit and Shoptalkapp without saying why.

axod 17y ago
Hi, I wrote Mibbit. For me, last time I used campfire, it was pretty minimalist. That's great if 'chat' is all you need, but it seems like there's a ton of different use cases, and an absolute TON of feature suggestions. A lot of it may also come down to taste. Some people like minimalism, some don't. >> "There are more people in the comments here saying Campfire needs to be superseded. Why?" everything needs superseding at some point, it's how things improve. Surely. Unless they are actively superseding themselves with new versions. You can't really stand still. Is campfire still being developed and improved upon? Is it really the best it can be? What features did they add in the last month? There's certainly space for a lot of webchat apps, and I'm skeptical that campfire is 'the best webchat can be' (And neither is Mibbit for that matter). I can't speak for the other webchat developers, but in my case, working on mibbit is just plain fun. It's somewhere I can think up fun new features and plug them in. Like the recent addition of flags/timezones in the user list (patent pending) so you know where/when people are. And (after seeing an example on HN ;) the addition of LaTeX rendering).
- tonystubblebine 17y ago
  That's a great story for all of the entrepreneurs that read HN, including me, but I was asking as a potential customer. So far the customer story for all three of these products has been pretty weak. I read the comments and I visited the sites. The thing that stood out for me most was that all three products think Campfire is bad. If I don't think that, does that mean your products aren't for me? I'm not trying to cause an argument, but wanted to give some honest feedback, that you guys could work on the customer pitch.
  - axod 17y ago
    I don't know really. Mibbit usage is growing really well, I don't particularly think Campfire is bad, I just think it's minimalist, and that I can do better than campfire (for my definition of better).
mrshoe 17y ago
To chime in from the ShopTalk team, I would echo a lot of what axod has said. As a Campfire user, I'm sure you understand how important persistent group chat is to your organization. Unfortunately, most people aren't like you (yet)! We think there is a lot of room in this space, because more and more companies will realize how useful apps like ours are over the next few years. It's a relatively young, growing market. Aside from that, there are a lot of improvements yet to be made in order to polish the group chat experience. One thing that we do, for example, is to allow users to sit in multiple rooms and be notified immediately about activity in background rooms. If you have more than one team using your account, that quickly becomes very important. That's just an example of one cool feature we've already implemented. We're still in beta, so there's a ton yet to come from us. Thanks for checking it out.
- tonystubblebine 17y ago
  Right, that's the type of example I'm looking for. We're just five people, so one room is fine. But now I know that if we outgrow Campfire there are other options.

axod 17y ago

Hi, I wrote Mibbit. For me, last time I used campfire, it was pretty minimalist. That's great if 'chat' is all you need, but it seems like there's a ton of different use cases, and an absolute TON of feature suggestions. A lot of it may also come down to taste. Some people like minimalism, some don't. >> "There are more people in the comments here saying Campfire needs to be superseded. Why?" everything needs superseding at some point, it's how things improve. Surely. Unless they are actively superseding themselves with new versions. You can't really stand still. Is campfire still being developed and improved upon? Is it really the best it can be? What features did they add in the last month? There's certainly space for a lot of webchat apps, and I'm skeptical that campfire is 'the best webchat can be' (And neither is Mibbit for that matter). I can't speak for the other webchat developers, but in my case, working on mibbit is just plain fun. It's somewhere I can think up fun new features and plug them in. Like the recent addition of flags/timezones in the user list (patent pending) so you know where/when people are. And (after seeing an example on HN ;) the addition of LaTeX rendering).

tonystubblebine 17y ago
That's a great story for all of the entrepreneurs that read HN, including me, but I was asking as a potential customer. So far the customer story for all three of these products has been pretty weak. I read the comments and I visited the sites. The thing that stood out for me most was that all three products think Campfire is bad. If I don't think that, does that mean your products aren't for me? I'm not trying to cause an argument, but wanted to give some honest feedback, that you guys could work on the customer pitch.
- axod 17y ago
  I don't know really. Mibbit usage is growing really well, I don't particularly think Campfire is bad, I just think it's minimalist, and that I can do better than campfire (for my definition of better).

mrshoe 17y ago

To chime in from the ShopTalk team, I would echo a lot of what axod has said. As a Campfire user, I'm sure you understand how important persistent group chat is to your organization. Unfortunately, most people aren't like you (yet)! We think there is a lot of room in this space, because more and more companies will realize how useful apps like ours are over the next few years. It's a relatively young, growing market. Aside from that, there are a lot of improvements yet to be made in order to polish the group chat experience. One thing that we do, for example, is to allow users to sit in multiple rooms and be notified immediately about activity in background rooms. If you have more than one team using your account, that quickly becomes very important. That's just an example of one cool feature we've already implemented. We're still in beta, so there's a ton yet to come from us. Thanks for checking it out.

tonystubblebine 17y ago
Right, that's the type of example I'm looking for. We're just five people, so one room is fine. But now I know that if we outgrow Campfire there are other options.