

Leaving my job & starting my own thing - dan_sim
http://macournoyer.com/blog/2009/09/29/leaving-and-starting/

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tonystubblebine
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saying Campfire needs to be superseded.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
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superseded.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
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
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).

------
petercooper
To provide some context, Marc is the guy behind the Create Your Own
Programming Language e-book/screencast discussed recently on HN:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=813133>

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stanleydrew
I congratulate him for starting his own thing, but it's going to be very hard
to get me to leave my google apps group chat. Transcripts are saved and
searchable alongside my email. I do wish they'd support xmpp persistent rooms
though.

------
ams6110
I guess I'm either getting old or just have a different mindset. I think of
chat as as enormous distraction to getting work done. I am one of those people
who disables intrusive alerts from email and anything else that might lurk in
the system tray and interrupt me. I check my email a couple of times a day,
and generally sign off of chat services if I want to concentrate. Good luck to
you though; clearly a lot of people have a different view on this.

------
swombat
Sounds good. I signed up. Campfire deserves to be superseded. Somehow I always
thought Mibbit would be the one to do it, but I guess not.

~~~
axod
I think Mibbit has a _few_ more users than Campfire ;) So in quite a lot of
ways, I believe it has superseded Campfire.

That said, still _plenty_ more to be done...

Nice to have more entrants to the 'webchat' space in any event :D

PS. Latex support is cool! <http://www.mibbit.com/tex.png>

~~~
swombat
They're not the same users. Mibbit doesn't offer a persistent, private
chatroom like Campfire does.

~~~
axod
Sure it does :/ you just setup a private channel, and put a bot in there to
log it.

I do get what you're saying though, and agreed. It's not "packaged" as that.

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akmiller
Seems like, when it comes to group chat, Google Wave is going to be the 800lb
gorilla in the room.

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edw519
It goes without saying and I'm sure you already know it, but it's so important
that it needs to be said (again):

Get something out there, sooner rather than later.

Many of us have been there. We want to make something so good that we just
want to add "one more thing" before we release. Next thing you know, it's a
year later and we wonder where the time went. I imagine you guys are just too
saavy to let that happen. Good luck!

------
charlesju
Free startup idea for you: IRC as a service.

