

Show HN: a new team chat web/irc tool - nic-ferrier
http://www.teamchat.net

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jlf
Congratulations, Nic, on what is likely the world's first Emacs-hosted
startup! For those who don't know, teamchat is implemented in Emacs Lisp using
Nic's elnode (async web server) and shoesoff (IRC bouncer) libraries, among
others.

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nic-ferrier
Thanks jlf!

You guys at #emacs have helped this happen. An awesome community.

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steverb
Well, that was deflating.

Sent out the link to several co-workers (since we are looking for this sort of
tool right now) and then we all get the "We'll let you know when we go live"
email.

So thanks for making me look like an idiot.

~~~
rocky1138
This^. Did the exact same :S

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nic-ferrier
If you ping me on twitter I'll make sure you're prioritized. We are obviously
wanted teams to try this to tell us what is good and what isn't. So if you're
a team we want you basically.

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georgespencer
I would be really excited to try this. Is it live yet? I always think it's
better to save Show HN posts for products that we can actually play with.
Looking forward to seeing this in any case.

~~~
nic-ferrier
I know... I know. I prefer that too.

The trouble is this is for teams, you kinda have to have a team. We wanted to
gauge interest so we've done it this way.

If we can we'll go live for collections of people (if there are 2 or 3 people
from the same company email domain) this week or next.

~~~
steverb
Can you please make it clear on the register page that there is no publicly
available product yet?

I had three guys from my team sign up so we could test it out, and only after
signing up did we find out that it's not live yet.

~~~
nic-ferrier
will do. I'll also try and make sure you get prioritized for go live.

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stephen_mcd
I'm about a day away from releasing Gnotty, which is a similar tool but open
source: <https://github.com/stephenmcd/gnotty>

Mobile-friendly IRC web client, private rooms, and bots with
commands/webhooks.

~~~
nic-ferrier
I'm not going to advertize it that much (because I don't want to support
people that way yet) but all the code behind teamchat.net is freely available
on github.

~~~
stephen_mcd
Awesome :-)

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RossM
Doesn't appear to be live yet (the confirmation email says they'll send a
message when they are).

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jiggy2011
Minor point: It would be nice to be able to click those screenshots and get
bigger versions. It's currently very difficult to see what the application
looks like.

~~~
zaargy
There are some bigger screenshots on the about page.

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xeroxmalf
Just a heads up: you haven't set a page header/name yet!

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grannyg00se
There's also an extra closing div tag in there.

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nic-ferrier
awww man. templating. thanks for catching.

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tommi
Images are not clickable for full resolution.

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nic-ferrier
they are now.

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richtaur
I built something like this (a long time ago) for my own purposes. So did a
startup we're working with!

That says there might be a need for it, but on the downside it's really simple
to build, so competition can spring up very quickly.

~~~
nic-ferrier
it's simple to build a simple one... but the more polished takes more time.
Why not just offload that work to someone else? That's our view anyway. We've
chatted to some potential clients and other companies running their operations
this way.

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zaargy
Love the idea! About time someone did this. What's the tech stack like?

~~~
nic-ferrier
It's all emacslisp. Including the webserver (it's elnode). So there is an irc
bouncer written in elisp tightly integrated with the elnode webapp. The
bouncer uses a modified rcirc (built into emacs) to connect to the irc
servers.

The robot framework is also written in emacslisp.

The irc servers are ngircd and the webserver is nginx.

~~~
JoelMcCracken
Bomb-diggity. I saw your gravatar and immediately thought "Omy is this an el-
node projet!?" Sweet.

~~~
nic-ferrier
I'm kinda surprised that people haven't picked up on that bit and asked
questions. You'd have thought hackers would be interested in that bit :-)

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Nickste
I tried to register with a .co.za (South Africa) domain name and it caused the
following error: not a valid email address?

Looking forward to seeing the product!

~~~
nic-ferrier
That should be fixed.

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mars
kind of similar to grove:

<https://grove.io>

~~~
mars
i think what could really make the difference is the video chat feature
though. if properly implemented...does it work fluently?

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nic-ferrier
Yes. We're veterans of previous video startups. This is video meeting done
right. It's not a big part of the product but it is important coz it means you
don't need skype or hangout or whatever in addition to this.

~~~
plaguuuuuu
I'm looking to write an open source app with basically similar video chat
functionality. Could I ask what's the best way of implementing this?

I'm guessing WebRTC would be the way to go... once it is released at least

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qwesko
www.mebeam.com/chat_team

~~~
nic-ferrier
yeah. there are loads of alternative video chat apps. that's not the point of
teamchat.

