
How We Want To Fix Team Chat - toddmorey
http://awesomatic.com/
======
SeanLuke
It's not entirely clear from the text what these guys mean by "threaded
replies", so I must assume from their screenshot they mean replies which come
in in threaded order. And this is, I think, a terrible idea. I understand the
need: you can't tell who's replying to what. But the fix is wrong.

Unlike, say, HN or reddit, chats are real-time things. Like most real-time
things we perceive and digest them as streams which dribble in one message at
a time. As humans we're designed to perceive and understand real-time things
as streams: video, audio, events, timelines. We can sit right at the point of
"now" and watch every single one of the messages come in, and respond to the
ones we need to.

Threaded replies don't come in in a stream order. They get scattered
throughout the space of all messages from all points of time. They're buried
under heaps of hierarchies or lost off-page. Even if you're cued into the fact
that they've arrived, you have to go hunt for them, a cognitively challenging
task which takes away from following the stream of time. It's as if late books
to a library didn't come in through the late book slot but rather magically
appeared all over the library, back on their respective shelves, where you had
to go manually find each one of them and stamp it returned.

~~~
toddmorey
Excellent point and this is certainly a feature that we are tweaking the dials
on. We've currently landed on a solution where a reply comes in as the latest
item (in chronological order) with a reference back to the original message.
That saves you from the tedious work of describing who you are replying to in
a fast moving chatroom. That view persists throughout your active session.
Later, when you return for reference, the chat lines organize themselves in
the threaded view you see in the screenshot. It's starting to feel right but
like all the features, we need to live with them a while to know for sure.

~~~
majormajor
I've always loved SBNation's solution for this. When you're logged in,
comments auto-refresh (still in the original threaded tree form), and there
are keyboard navigation shortcuts for navigating comments and marking them as
read (so that when new comments come in, you can then navigate only the new
ones). There are also "up" links to the parent comment. Another huge benefit
compared to something like HN is that it saves the state of which comments
have been shown to you to your user account, so if you close the window and
come back to the discussion later it knows exactly which comments came in
since you were last on the page, so you can quickly review only the new
content.

It creates (especially for real-time stuff like discussing an ongoing sports
game) a fantastic blend of the live nature of a chat with the ability to have
deeper individual discussions (through the threading preservation and display)
at the same time.

------
eiji
I keep seeing this over and over on numerous landing pages: Why do people run
ads for other companies? Do you guys get Apple hardware at a discount and must
show them in your pictures?

This has nothing to do with being for or against any vendor. It's alienating
your users, and you never want to do that. Brands communicate emotions, it's
risky to expose yourself to that. Or is that on purpose?

~~~
Shenglong
I don't believe that's necessarily true. This is more passive than active, and
piggybacking off an universally recognized brand can be quite beneficial.

Apple has spent billions of dollars crafting a brand that inspires trust,
quality, and modernness - and regardless of how an individual feels about
Apple on a conscious level, the strong majority probably associate those three
things with Apple products.

Slapping a Macbook Air in their design passively speaks to viewers by saying
"we're a quality brand, you can trust us, and we're the future in this
outdated industry." If you look around, you'll actually see that a lot of
successful startups (usually post-first generation) piggyback off one aspect
or another of established brands.

~~~
toddmorey
I think you are right about the brand transference, although to be perfectly
honest, we hadn't thought it out that far. Our real reasoning was simply to
clearly delineate the screenshots from the rest of the page. It would be
fascinating to A/B test laptops and no laptops to see if there's a perceivable
difference.

------
secure
After reading through the entire page, this sounds like quite some feature-
creep. It seems to support every way in which you can possibly organize
communication :-).

Here are a few questions:

• Does it run in a web browser?

• Does it work on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS, …?

• Is it a service or can I host it on my own server? After all, it targets the
team chat "problem", and oftentimes the things discussed in team chats are
confidential.

• Is it based on some other chat protocol, e.g. IRC or XMPP multi user
channels? Or do I need to get everyone on the team to switch over to it?

~~~
toddmorey
Thanks for asking these questions. I gave myself a head smack for not
including some of this info on the page itself. I'll add in, but answer here:

1\. Absolutely runs in a browser and we're doing all we can to make it a
first-class citizen. The idea is that you can bring ad hoc members to the team
without them having to do any setup.

2\. We're starting to build out native apps with deeper integrations (ie, the
Mac notification center). We're starting with the commercial desktop and
mobile platforms, but as a big fan of Linux I'm eager to have a native client
there, too.

3\. Right now it's a hosted service, but others, too, have brought up the
sensitivity of team data. Reminds me of how Memoto received feedback that
eventually brought them to incorporate an option for local storage rather than
pushing images to their servers automatically.

4\. At this early stage it's a custom protocol, but that was the fastest way
to stand up our interface layer. I do think it would greatly help adoption to
be XMPP compatible and we're digging in to the potential of that. Video /
audio (which is used to complement the chat) is based on WebRTC.

~~~
jlogsdon
IRC compatibility at the last is fantastic, and it's a simple protocol.
Flowdock offers this (and is a similar service).

~~~
shuzchen
my workplace uses Hipchat, and they appear XMPP based. You can access it using
your IRC client with bitlbee as a bridge (I just set this up this past weekend
- I don't know why I didn't do it sooner). Not as simple as direct IRC
compatibility, but something I can live with.

I imagine it's easier for them to build custom features on XMPP (since the
protocol supports custom messages/actions) rather than IRC (where you'll have
to build your tool around IRC's paradigm of chat-rooms and text only chat).

------
smonte
Looks interesting. Our team also got tired of using traditional chat clients
for communication, and we've been using <https://www.flowdock.com/> for a year
now.

From a consumer's perspective, it's always nicer to have more options to
choose from!

------
Metrop0218
As a big chat room user, there's something that bugs me about this. I think
that one of the main reasons the chatroom hasn't changed in so long is because
it's so simple. You connect and begin chatting. It looks like this idea is
putting a big emphasis on organizing, which means that the user has to do more
work, which isn't good. But I'm just being the skeptic here, don't mind me.

------
lobotryas
Wow. As another poster mentioned, this really feels like feature creep. I made
it about half-way through the intro before my eyes glazed over and I lost
interest because there was so much to absorb. At least I recommend a more
streamlined (read: shorter and more compelling) intro.

Personally, I'm going to pass on your product because from your description it
feels like it'll be hard to learn, have too many features I'll never use and
be slow (due to bloat). :(

~~~
toddmorey
Thanks for the comment. I can see that spelled out all together, it feels
busy. The great news is that at heart, it's chat and the extras are hidden
easily. Our model is a good text editor, with powerful features like code
folding and columular selection available but not required learning. If you
feel you have to learn awesomatic to use awesomatic, we've missed the mark.
All that said, every feature is undergoing a brutal death match for survival.
If anything, we see the product getting leaner as we move towards public
release. The beta feedback will be invaluable.

------
martindale
Looks interesting, but does it support existing chat protocols like XMPP or
IRC?

This is one of the main reasons I stick with Grove ( <http://grove.io> ) for
team chat needs.

~~~
twodayslate
IRC backend would be great.

------
lewisflude
Was going to respond with "chat isn't broken" but I actually quite like the
look of this!

~~~
toddmorey
Thanks! Our biggest issue that got us headed this direction was how many times
we'd use chat to decide something... and then separately need to track those
decisions (spreadsheets, project management systems... we tried them all).
From our early experience with this approach, it just feels right to have it
all in one spot. The added bonus is that the lightweight, informal feel of
chat promotes a lot more usage than any other approach we've tried.

------
jvehent
The more features you'll add to your products, the less I'll use them. I like
clean, simple, readable interfaces because what matter is the information
being transported, not the interface around it. I use finch as my IM client,
and Mutt for emails.

Make a web client that behaves like a ncurses interface, lives on the server
so I can leave it open all the time, and provides an efficient search feature,
and then I'll be interested.

------
tolmasky
This is looking pretty good, especially considering how absolutely terrible
Apple has increasingly managed to make iChat/Messages recently.

A huge feature for me and my team would be the ability to use encryption,
specifically private/public key pairs. If all messages could be encrypted on
the client, then your servers would never store plaintext, and then I think I
wouldn't even mind whether you hosted it or not.

~~~
famousactress
I know our organization would like this also, but it basically makes indexing
for search pretty impossible doesn't it?

~~~
tolmasky
I would make that trade if necessary. Alternatively, the search could happen
client side (which I understand is more difficult, which is why I'm willing to
have no search)

------
mutru
Most of these concepts are already implemented in Flowdock:
<https://www.flowdock.com/>

------
troygoode
This is great. I submitted by gmail account address to be notified when the
beta is available. I'll be joining a great company, NGP VAN, that has recently
undergone a merger and now has large teams in both DC and Boston. This tool
seems like it'd be a great way to help the two dev offices work more closely
together. Any ETA on when we could get access?

------
jcampbell1
This looks like an interesting product. However, the marketing copy is in
severe need of an editor. There are Bushisms like "honing in on" and
paragraphs that end with rhetorical questions. If I were the founders, I would
find someone less familiar with the product to hone and polish the copy.

~~~
toddmorey
jcampbell: You are certainly right and I humbly admit we could have spent more
time polishing the copy. My English teacher would be heartbroken to hear a
direct comparison to The Decider, though that was fair play. I do think a
solid editor is a phenomenal resource and an important part of the preflight
checklist. I love the essays that thank a handful of people for reading prior
drafts.

~~~
epa
Still a beautiful website design though.

------
falcolas
This looks great. The big deal breaker (or maker) for me and my team is... is
it encrypted on the client side?

------
kodablah
One of the big features I would like with the thread-based chat is "unread
message" support. Since the chat may (should) be updated live as messages are
sent, they could be all over the place. An example of a site that does this
well is sbnation.com.

------
silverlight
Pinged you on Twitter, but I'd love an invite for our small (< 10) person
team...we literally spend all day on Hipchat and while it's good, something
with a bit more organization would be very welcome. Email's in my profile.

------
tcarnell
I am actively building 'TeamStinct.com' to solve team communication, and
especially as a replacement for email.

<http://teamstinct.com/>

I would be happy if anybody is interested in helping with the project?

------
ryandvm
Any plans on support Google Apps natively through the Google Apps Marketplace?

------
stormental
Sounds very interesting, but the home page is a bit of information overload.
The @@ alert looks really useful. Wish there was a product video. Definitely
looking forward to checking it out when it launches.

------
philsnow
Maybe it's intentional but you've got a typo in one of your mocks:
<http://awesomatic.com/images/nested-topics.jpg>

------
dangoor
It would be cool to be able to try this out for open source projects (with
public archives and all of that), though I'd imagine that's not their primary
use case :)

------
dorkitude
This looks awesome. I have the pleasure of knowing the team behind this, and
they are insanely capable people who can do what they say.

Can't wait for the beta!

------
lardissone
An idea when it's going to be released to the public?

~~~
toddmorey
This has been a part-time labor of love, but the more we build/use it, the
more we love it. We've recently applied to TechStars to see if we can
#domorefaster as they say. Hopefully they take interest in our team. So far,
the idea does seem pretty well received... at this point, we plan to pursue it
regardless. We want v1 out within the first half of 2013.

------
edu
Looks nice, want to try it :D

------
davidsalazar
nice

------
wildranter
This is really cool. I really hope you guys pull it out!

But I still think the best way to fix team chat is to give people free beer.
:)

