
Slack vs. HipChat – The Chat Wars - jstoiko
http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/23/slack-and-hipchat-are-on-the-verge-of-launching-chat-wars/
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lokedhs
I would like to see some kind of standard. Having multiple closed platforms is
great for the profits of the companies that run said services, but the users
are the ones that have to pay the price.

We've seen this already once with messaging systems. Remember AOL, MSN
Messenger, ICQ, etc? Now, it's no better, just that the actor's names are
different. Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Wechat, Line.

Do we really want this to happen all over again? I certainly can see the
appeal of a system like Slack. After all, we used it ourselves for a while
until we decided that we didn't want the vendor lock-in, and instead started
developing out own, open source system that implements lots of what Slack is,
but that can be self-hosted by anyone.

I would love to see the makers of these kinds of applications to create some
kind of standard around these systems.

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stephenr
Xmpp + a modern web client.

Honestly at this point any open source chat/IM system not building on xmpp or
irc would need a pretty good reason why not

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lokedhs
If I had read this message before we started our project I would have agreed
with you much more than I am right now. That's not to say I completely
disagree with you either, I don't.

Originally we tried to build something on top of either IRC or XMPP. But, it
turns out that a system like Potato (or Slack, if you like) is less a
messaging system and more like email, or a wiki.

Messages are persistent, searchable, and editable. You can attach files to
messages, and for some kinds of messages you can even have interactions like
votes. None of this is part of IRC which is designed to be a messaging system
where a message is sent, and after that it really doesn't exist anymore (other
than in the scrollback of the users who happened to be in the channel when the
message was sent).

When testing Slack, I used to be really frustrated about their horrible IRC
support. I still am, but I now understand why they don't give it much
attention. It's really not compatible with how these systems work.

I'm definitely not against IRC. I'm always on our Potato channel but I'm also
on IRC. After all, I wouldn't want to leave #lisp or #emacs.

As for XMPP, it suffers from many of the same issues as IRC. However, it does
have an extension mechanism that could be used to support features such as
persistence but as far as I know there is no standard for this, which means
such standard has to be agreed upon, which is what I called for in the last
message.

~~~
stephenr
Apache wave (aka Google wave) has a lot of what you mentioned, and it's based
on xmpp.

