
Chats are not dead yet - mweibel
http://amiadogroup.github.com/candy/
======
slowpoke

      Awesome Features!
    
        Beautiful default theme
        Join multiple rooms and start private conversations
        Get notified when new messages arrive
        Ignore spammers and people you don't like
        Moderation: Kick and ban users, change the subject of the room
    

Um. So basically, they just reinvented IRC, based it on an XMPP backend and
spiced it up with a load of funky buzzwords?

~~~
darklajid
I don't get it. XMPP already has everything IRC has.

\- Federation

\- Multiple (persistent) rooms (Look up XMPP Groupchat)

\- Permissions (think chanserv, /mode +ov etc.)

\- Private messages

What am I missing? I'm hanging out on IRC every day, on multiple networks. No,
I don't use XMPP groupchat so far - just to counter that argument.

The reason for that is, that

\- XMPP clients usually suck in that area, in my opinion. So the protocol
would be fine for me and I'd like to see IM tied in with groupchat/channels,
but really.. Look at the clients and it's like really, really crappy IRC
clients (to get back to your point: Yes, those UIs are usually following IRC
designs, just with look like from a decade in the past)

\- Adoption. For company internal stuff XMPP is great. If someone with high
profile (GTalk? Facebook Chat?) would build a product based on this protocol,
it would boost the adoption tremendously. On the other hand, as I stated a
couple of days earlier in another XMPP discussion: As long as Google or
Facebook are not supporting federation, they are not really supporting the
core feature of XMPP in my book.

Did they reinvent IRC? No, XMPP did. Years ago, it's an XMPP standard. This is
just an IRC client look-alike that doesn't suck completely.

~~~
there
_\- XMPP clients usually suck in that area, in my opinion._

what do you use for irc? at least irssi and adium do irc and xmpp, i'm sure
others do too.

 _If someone with high profile (GTalk? Facebook Chat?) would build a product
based on this protocol, it would boost the adoption tremendously. On the other
hand, as I stated a couple of days earlier in another XMPP discussion: As long
as Google or Facebook are not supporting federation, they are not really
supporting the core feature of XMPP in my book._

huh? google chat does have xmpp federation. i run my own jabber server and
talk to a bunch of people that use google chat through the web interface or a
jabber client.

~~~
darklajid
IRC:

Well - irssi actually. But when I say that I think that the XMPP clients suck
I'm talking about nice and clean GUI things. That I can force upon my non-
technical peers.

My 'presence' in this discussion should show that I'm a strong xmpp proponent,
crappy clients (in the 'Not for my SO' sense) or not.

pyre said the very same thing in this thread. Sorry for that - I'm clearly
mistaken and need to figure out what the reason for this assessment was.. You
(and pyre) are correct, federation was announced int 2006(!) here:

[http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/open-federation-
for-g...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/open-federation-for-google-
talk.html)

Thanks a lot for the clarification.

------
erikpukinskis
This is awesome. I just wish it was a hosted service. Somewhat regularly I
want to do an online group chat with some people, and there's no good way to
do it. Yeah, you could spend hours trying to get Skype installed on everyone's
machine, or teach people how to use IRC (yeah right). But with a nice hosted
chat service, I could just click a button, and send everyone a URL and be done
with it.

I'm surprised no one has gone after this use case. I would even potentially
pay a couple bucks for a "day pass" or whatever. Convore could've gone in this
direction, but their signup process is too onerous. I don't want to have to
walk five people in my family through signing up for their service just to get
a chat going.

~~~
toddml
A large number of New York City startups use something called PartyChat
(hosted on AppEngine). It is maintained by some current/former NYC Googlers,
and basically creates an IRC style chat interface over XMPP, allowing you to
create fairly full featured chatrooms using your various Gtalk or XMPP
accounts. It's easily extensible with commands and "hooks", so you can pipe
code commits, deploy messages, alerts, and the like into the chatroom.

<http://partychapp.appspot.com/>

Also check out partychat-hooks for simple HTTP API integration. It was written
by one of our engineers at bitly to ease some of the aforementioned
integrations. <http://partychat-hooks.appspot.com/>

~~~
sunsu
Wow, this is an excellent tool. Can't believe I haven't heard about it before
now.

------
timmfin
Suprised no one has yet brought up the obvious comparison to campfirenow.com
and hipchat.com. While being free and self host-able is nice, the Candy UI
seems light years behind its for pay competitors.

But I'm glad to see more options available. I've been advocating web-based
chat in my offices for quite a while now, and am happy that a few decent
choices have finally started to pop up in the past couple years.

~~~
chrischen
I agree it would be better if they just focused on this being used for
building chat into apps, rather than being ready out of the box as a chat
widget.

------
dmd
What I really miss is character-at-a-time chat, a la unix 'talk/ntalk/ytalk'
or VMS 'PHONE'. It created an intimacy you can't get with line-at-a-time
solution, and there is, as far as I know, NO modern replacement for it -
literally no way at all to do this any more other than actually setting up and
using talk and talkd.

It's sort of possible to emulate it using something like etherpad, but it's
really not at all the same.

~~~
aristidb
Wave was like that. :-)

~~~
dmd
It wasn't, though - updates were 'chunky' - you'd type a few words, and the
other person would see them all appear at once. Even that little bit of loss
of real-time destroys the illusion of a shared space.

~~~
jamesgeck0
Google Docs used to be like that, but Wave was capable of character-by-
character updates. You would see updates in larger chunks if latency was high
enough, but I've participated in several waves where I could see characters
appearing one to three at a time.

------
earnubs
See also: <http://www.irccloud.com/>

------
pornel
Having demo run in the "screenshot" is a really cool idea.

------
sciurus
Could this easily be adapted for chats between the webpage visitor and a
single other, predetermined user rather than many-user chatrooms? I've been
looking for a web-embeddable open source chat client that could be used to
power a support feature of a website.

~~~
mweibel
Well, you can try to do that. But it's focused on multi-user chatting. Maybe
another software would be a better fit.

------
dreamdu5t
Look, it's hipchat!

------
subnetvj
Seems like a chat client for geeks(i.e. we HN frequenters). Well, just looking
at there setup section!! But as already said in other comments, there's
nothing new.

The title could have been "chats are not dead yet, but innovative new chat
tool are"

------
firedev
<http://jaconda.im> is #1 for developer team chat. We use its integration with
git and issue tracker. Has XMPP, persistent and basically the shit.

------
evanw
I wonder if they plan to support Nginx in the future?

> To run the example you'll also need Apache HTTP server with the following
> modules enabled: mod_rewrite, mod_proxy and mod_proxy_http.

~~~
mweibel
You can also use nginx. I don't know about nginx supporting url rewritings,
but basicly you just need that for rewriting http-bind/ to your jabber
server's http-bind

------
evilpie
Can i please get the same UI/feeling, but with an IRC backend, no need to
reinvent that. Aalso the irc protcol is kinda weird and bloated with
extensions.

~~~
true_religion
If the IRC protocol is bloated, then why use it?

------
Stratego
Am I the only one here wishing for some persistence?

------
astral303
This seems great for a persisent group chat! The chat client is in the browser
and I automatically seem to get persistence. Seems nice.

------
Skiptar
It looks lovely and pretty, but does seem like they're trying to re-invent the
wheel.

~~~
darklajid
Disclaimer: I have no ties to the project, no idea if I can find a use for it
myself. But I somehow feel the need to defend them against this 'reinvent the
wheel' thing.

No, they don't. If that project makes any sense at all (the 'Under the hood'
page only defines what they used to build the frontend, not what the backend
is) they are using <http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html> on the server.

Quoting:

"This specification defines an XMPP protocol extension for multi-user text
chat, whereby multiple XMPP users can exchange messages in the context of a
room or channel, similar to Internet Relay Chat (IRC). In addition to standard
chatroom features such as room topics and invitations, the protocol defines a
strong room control model, including the ability to kick and ban users, to
name room moderators and administrators, to require membership or passwords in
order to join the room, etc."

So - yeah. XMPP 'reinvented' this. First version is from 2002..

So these guys try to build a good and extensible UI for a feature that is
available for a long time. Let's judge them by that, not by our 'get off my
lawn, IRC is good enough' attitude.

Now, if we look at node.js chat examples.. Those are usually reinventing IRC
(but again, those are trying to demo technology or build a good web client.
Criticizing the protocol wouldn't make that much sense for these projects
either, imo).

------
Flam
They should take a look at <http://qwebirc.org/>

------
alnayyir
Only non-coders think chat is dead. We still live on IRC.

------
Kwpolska
Thanks, but I'll stay with IRC and irssi.

------
penetrarthur
CTRL+F -> IRC -> no results -> ctrl+w

