

Ask HN: What team chat tool do you recommend? Hipchat, Flowdock, Hall, Campfire? - rolandal

Hey guys -<p>What team chat tools are you guys using? Having a strong mobile component is necessary since we all travel a lot! Hipchat is rated quite low&#x2F;buggy on the App Store... Any others I&#x27;m overlooking&#x2F;missing? Why do you use what you use, and how big is your team?<p>Thanks!<p>R
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clscott
We're still using Skype and starting to introduce irc.

One main advantage that Skype had going for it was a little known feature on
the Mac Skype 5 and 6 clients: ChatStyles [1]

The Mac Skype client used a copy of webkit to render the conversations and at
one point provided instructions to let you hook into that and style the
conversations the way you like with HTML templates, css and javascript.

We took advantage of this feature it to add communication short cuts, the main
example being that if someone typed #1234 in a chat and the person receiving
the message was using our ChatStyle #1234 would become a clickable link to the
appropriate bug in our issue tracking system.

Skype silently killed this feature in an update a few weeks ago, so our
thought is to go with IRC and and use an IRC bot that can provide these kinds
of shortcuts.

If there is another chat system that allows you to customize these kinds of
things, I'd love to hear about it.

[1] [http://joemiller.me/2011/05/24/alternative-skins-for-
skype-5...](http://joemiller.me/2011/05/24/alternative-skins-for-skype-5-on-
mac-osx/)

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pjnewton
Great question and something I'm interested in finding out as well. We
currently use Skype but I'm not totally happy with it.

I've looked into a few others but if I'm going to go through the trouble of
switching I'd like to find something HIPPA compliant so we can use it for more
than general basic conversation...

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staunch
Highly recommend running your own Jabber server and using Pidgin/Adium. Easy
to use, works everywhere. You can run it on your private network.

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peteryan4721
Yammer - anyone?

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27182818284
IRC

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lsiebert
sure IRC is great, but for mobile?

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27182818284
I've often thought there was space for a nice IRC wrapper in the form of an
app. I don't need to type out /msg nickserv on my phone, but a series of
buttons to help with things like that would be awesome.

