So, that's interesting, but it solves a problem that others are creating. I'd rather solve it the right way, and enable a feature that works well for me : tagged emails.
Please, please, please check your email validation... Disallowing + notation doesn't make sense, and I for one won't sign up for a service that doesn't allow it. http://i.imgur.com/xfVDKyL.png
The local part may consist of alphabetic and numeric characters, and the following characters: !, #, $, %, &, ', *, +, -, /, =, ?, ^, _, `, {, |, } and ~, possibly with dot separators (.), inside, but not at the start, end or next to another dot separator (RFC2822 3.2.4).
Call me old-fashioned, but I like to make informed decisions before signing up for something – so where are the specs?
- What sort of encryption is used where?
- How is this encryption ‘enforced’?
- How are messages stored/logged and accessible to whom?
- How highly available are these services?
- How are users authenticated?
- What limitations exist for use on tablets?
- …
Just calling something ‘real geeky’ and throwing out some buzzwords is…well, insufficient to convince me.
I think the 37signals guys benefit from their corporate/individual brands in that case. If you're just some person popping up on HN without that kind of historical track record, it's a lot easier to be dubious that the proper precautions have bene taken.
- AES 256 SSL
- www.tesla.im works ONLY in an always on HTTPS mode.
- Messages are visible ONLY to chat room members.
- The servers are in an auto-scaling mode.
- A combination of a valid email + bcrypt passwords.
- A few UI glitches when using on low resolution/small screen tablets.
SSL is secure connections, but not message encryption. This still means the messages are visible to Tesla.im or any server that transfers the mssages, even if you do not log it at some point is available is cleartext. That poses a privacy risk just like the mass majority of modern communication apps. https://www.cyphrd.com/ is working on a new communication app that actually poses client-side encryption with proper key sharing to keep communication private between the participents.
I could build them myself and then watch them break over time, or I could pay someone else to do it, and have more time to build things that I really want to build. That's the point of SaaS.
And when you want something that isn't being built for you? You _can't_ build it yourself at that point because there's no text interface to consume.
My complaint isn't so much against SaaS as a whole as it is against things that violate the Unix philosophy. I'm against things that try to do many complex tasks and don't provide a simple text interface (or RESTful API or whatever).
The tradeoff is you get basic features all at once with little overhead. What you lose is any ability whatsoever to make other things work on top of the service/program/application/whatever you're using.
The reason this is always bad is because you're only a first time user once; you pay the startup/integration/setup/whatever cost once. After that, you're a user and you get to suffer under the poor or non-existent integrations forever. See also: http://xkcd.com/1205/
All of his points work just fine for me in Hipchat, except possibly the third bullet depending on what exactly you need. Hipchat does have search, though.
I think that's true for most things that don't follow the Unix philosophy and try to do too much. "Everything just works all the time, unless this and except for that sometimes depending on this but you can that."
This problem has been solved 100 different ways; offline with plenty of clients throughout the years and even online with Google chat and Facebook messenger.
What is your "different way"? What makes your solution more valuable? There is not enough of a pitch on the front page to get me to try it out.
http://davidcel.is/blog/2012/09/06/stop-validating-email-add...
Fix this, and I'll try it out.
I tried: myname+tesla.im@gmail.com I got: 'Enter a valid email'
edit: can I get some commentary to season the down-voting?