
Real-Time Collaboration Has Stalled...For Now - terpua
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/10/real-time-collaboration-has-st.php
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mrshoe
As all of us chatters and instant messengers grow up and enter the "real
world", we are realizing that those forms of communication and collaboration
can be really useful at work.

Unfortunately, the usual reaction is to get everyone in your office on
yahoo/aim/gchat/msn messenger, which is far from ideal.

I think this space is bound to see quite a bit of growth in the near future,
and it's far from a solved problem. That's why we're building
<http://shoptalkapp.com> :)

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terpua
What makes this different from Campfire or group chat in Gtalk?

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mrshoe
It's quite a bit different from group chat in Gtalk. The biggest difference is
that the rooms are persistent and any time you log in you can scroll back to
catch up on missed conversations. With Gtalk (or any IM service) group chats
are usually ad-hoc and treated more like meetings: you start one, talk for a
while, then close it. The idea here is to have a constant stream and have
topic- or team-oriented rooms where people can always go to ask questions or
get ideas from their coworkers.

It _is_ , however, very similar to Campfire. Right now, the advantages over
Campfire include performance (which is actually quite key for real-time
conversations like this), and the ability to sit in multiple rooms at once and
receive notifications about messages to you in background rooms (also pretty
important, we've found). That said, we're in beta! So, we definitely plan on
differentiating ourselves more in the coming months.

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aaronblohowiak
That is pretty similar to how a few starts i've worked at have treated skype.
Unread message counts are analogous to the bg chat thing you mention, you can
also get the scroll-back.

Please make a non-web client -- maybe an air app, even.

