Chats are not dead yet

http://amiadogroup.github.com/candy/

by mweibel • 15 years ago

152 72 15 years ago

amiadogroup.github.com

Kwpolska• 15 years ago

Thanks, but I'll stay with IRC and irssi.

slowpoke3• 15 years ago

  Awesome Features!

    Beautiful default theme
    Join multiple rooms and start private conversations
    Get notified when new messages arrive
    Ignore spammers and people you don't like
    Moderation: Kick and ban users, change the subject of the room

Um. So basically, they just reinvented IRC, based it on an XMPP backend and spiced it up with a load of funky buzzwords?

erikpukinskis2• 15 years ago

Except that only techies are able to use IRC. You can throw this on a web server and anyone will be able to use it. You could use it for your church chat room or something.

slowpoke3• 15 years ago

Er, no. That's like saying Linux is only CLI. It's outdated misinformation. There are loads of web clients, and you wouldn't believe what kinds of tech illiterate people I've seen on some networks.

temphn2• 15 years ago

You are absolutely right and I have no idea why you are being downvoted. When is the last time anyone has done IRC in the browser?

What this widget does is potentially bring Facebook Chat or Gmail style Chat to your site. That's worthwhile.

darklajid9• 15 years ago

I don't get it. XMPP already has everything IRC has.

- Federation

- Multiple (persistent) rooms (Look up XMPP Groupchat)

- Permissions (think chanserv, /mode +ov etc.)

- Private messages

What am I missing? I'm hanging out on IRC every day, on multiple networks. No, I don't use XMPP groupchat so far - just to counter that argument.

The reason for that is, that

- XMPP clients usually suck in that area, in my opinion. So the protocol would be fine for me and I'd like to see IM tied in with groupchat/channels, but really.. Look at the clients and it's like really, really crappy IRC clients (to get back to your point: Yes, those UIs are usually following IRC designs, just with look like from a decade in the past)

- Adoption. For company internal stuff XMPP is great. If someone with high profile (GTalk? Facebook Chat?) would build a product based on this protocol, it would boost the adoption tremendously. On the other hand, as I stated a couple of days earlier in another XMPP discussion: As long as Google or Facebook are not supporting federation, they are not really supporting the core feature of XMPP in my book.

Did they reinvent IRC? No, XMPP did. Years ago, it's an XMPP standard. This is just an IRC client look-alike that doesn't suck completely.

hamidpalo• 15 years ago

FB and GTalk DO use XMPP. I also imagine that AIM, MSN, and Skype all have some sort of a XMPP implementation as well since they all can talk to FB.

pyre• 15 years ago

IIRC Google does support federation. At least with Google Apps for Domains, you can add some records to your DNS that enable federation for your domain.

there• 15 years ago

- XMPP clients usually suck in that area, in my opinion.

what do you use for irc? at least irssi and adium do irc and xmpp, i'm sure others do too.

If someone with high profile (GTalk? Facebook Chat?) would build a product based on this protocol, it would boost the adoption tremendously. On the other hand, as I stated a couple of days earlier in another XMPP discussion: As long as Google or Facebook are not supporting federation, they are not really supporting the core feature of XMPP in my book.

huh? google chat does have xmpp federation. i run my own jabber server and talk to a bunch of people that use google chat through the web interface or a jabber client.

a3_nm• 15 years ago

If you dislike existing XMPP clients, you can use bitlbee (which is an IRC-XMPP gateway you can run on your server) and use your favorite IRC client.

temphn2• 15 years ago

Don't get the negativity. Is there a Javascript-API scriptable, browser-based IRC client out there?

Skiptar• 15 years ago

It looks lovely and pretty, but does seem like they're trying to re-invent the wheel.

darklajid9• 15 years ago

Disclaimer: I have no ties to the project, no idea if I can find a use for it myself. But I somehow feel the need to defend them against this 'reinvent the wheel' thing.

No, they don't. If that project makes any sense at all (the 'Under the hood' page only defines what they used to build the frontend, not what the backend is) they are using http://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html on the server.

Quoting:

"This specification defines an XMPP protocol extension for multi-user text chat, whereby multiple XMPP users can exchange messages in the context of a room or channel, similar to Internet Relay Chat (IRC). In addition to standard chatroom features such as room topics and invitations, the protocol defines a strong room control model, including the ability to kick and ban users, to name room moderators and administrators, to require membership or passwords in order to join the room, etc."

So - yeah. XMPP 'reinvented' this. First version is from 2002..

So these guys try to build a good and extensible UI for a feature that is available for a long time. Let's judge them by that, not by our 'get off my lawn, IRC is good enough' attitude.

Now, if we look at node.js chat examples.. Those are usually reinventing IRC (but again, those are trying to demo technology or build a good web client. Criticizing the protocol wouldn't make that much sense for these projects either, imo).

erikpukinskis2• 15 years ago

This is awesome. I just wish it was a hosted service. Somewhat regularly I want to do an online group chat with some people, and there's no good way to do it. Yeah, you could spend hours trying to get Skype installed on everyone's machine, or teach people how to use IRC (yeah right). But with a nice hosted chat service, I could just click a button, and send everyone a URL and be done with it.

I'm surprised no one has gone after this use case. I would even potentially pay a couple bucks for a "day pass" or whatever. Convore could've gone in this direction, but their signup process is too onerous. I don't want to have to walk five people in my family through signing up for their service just to get a chat going.

dexen2• 15 years ago

There is a very-well developed multi-person JS chat: http://www.mibbit.com/

With great cross-browser compatibility and rich functionality like file uploads and in-line previews you can't go wrong. Uses certain well established IM transport protocol that plays nice with your text-mode IM client ;-)

Yes, you can embed it on your website. Either ad-supported or paid-for.

moe2• 15 years ago

It seems you missed the part where he said "teach people how to use IRC (yeah right)".

The frontpage of mibbit is an instant "close-tab" to a non-nerd user.

darklajid9• 15 years ago

finch (a text mode client) should support xmpp (both as a well established IM protocol as well as a underrepresented multi user chat protocol) just fine. ;-)

DanBlake• 15 years ago

http://tinychat.com/anythinghere

has audio/video also

toddml• 15 years ago

A large number of New York City startups use something called PartyChat (hosted on AppEngine). It is maintained by some current/former NYC Googlers, and basically creates an IRC style chat interface over XMPP, allowing you to create fairly full featured chatrooms using your various Gtalk or XMPP accounts. It's easily extensible with commands and "hooks", so you can pipe code commits, deploy messages, alerts, and the like into the chatroom.

http://partychapp.appspot.com/

Also check out partychat-hooks for simple HTTP API integration. It was written by one of our engineers at bitly to ease some of the aforementioned integrations. http://partychat-hooks.appspot.com/

sunsu• 15 years ago

Wow, this is an excellent tool. Can't believe I haven't heard about it before now.

tombot• 15 years ago

This is awesome, love that it uses basic XMPP as the interface

ciupicri2• 15 years ago

Yahoo has support for chat rooms (conferences). I used it both at work and with friends.

gchucky• 15 years ago

At a previous employer we used Hipchat ( https://www.hipchat.com/ ) for this. Hosted service, had logging (which was exceedingly useful, it turns out), and a bunch of other features.

sim0n• 15 years ago

We (BakedCode) built http://prompt.im a few months back as a bit of fun (took us about 1-2 days to build) which sounds like what you're after. Here's an example: http://prompt.im/hackernews

pornel• 15 years ago

Having demo run in the "screenshot" is a really cool idea.

evilpie• 15 years ago

Can i please get the same UI/feeling, but with an IRC backend, no need to reinvent that. Aalso the irc protcol is kinda weird and bloated with extensions.

true_religion• 15 years ago

If the IRC protocol is bloated, then why use it?

metabrew• 15 years ago

i'm doing something like this at https://irccloud.com/

timmfin• 15 years ago

Suprised no one has yet brought up the obvious comparison to campfirenow.com and hipchat.com. While being free and self host-able is nice, the Candy UI seems light years behind its for pay competitors.

But I'm glad to see more options available. I've been advocating web-based chat in my offices for quite a while now, and am happy that a few decent choices have finally started to pop up in the past couple years.

chrischen• 15 years ago

I agree it would be better if they just focused on this being used for building chat into apps, rather than being ready out of the box as a chat widget.

mweibel3• 15 years ago

The good thing about Candy: You can extend it with plugins and customize the interface, both very easy. If you'd like more features - do it!

Stratego• 15 years ago

Am I the only one here wishing for some persistence?

Flam• 15 years ago

They should take a look at http://qwebirc.org/

dmd3• 15 years ago

What I really miss is character-at-a-time chat, a la unix 'talk/ntalk/ytalk' or VMS 'PHONE'. It created an intimacy you can't get with line-at-a-time solution, and there is, as far as I know, NO modern replacement for it - literally no way at all to do this any more other than actually setting up and using talk and talkd.

It's sort of possible to emulate it using something like etherpad, but it's really not at all the same.

aristidb• 15 years ago

Wave was like that. :-)

dmd3• 15 years ago

It wasn't, though - updates were 'chunky' - you'd type a few words, and the other person would see them all appear at once. Even that little bit of loss of real-time destroys the illusion of a shared space.

StavrosK2• 15 years ago

You can (could?) do it with ICQ, it had an option.

darklajid9• 15 years ago

Interesting. I never thought of this feature as 'intimate'. Most of the time I was annoyed, seeing the other one type

o n e c h a r a t a t i m e

I prefer waiting for a full line, that (hopefully) makes sense. And I try to convince myself that the person I'm chatting with right now isn't slow as molasses, he just takes a moment of time to think before typing a well-considered reply.

Hoff• 15 years ago

Ah, VMS PHONE.

Where the other party's typing skills (or lack thereof) are on full display.

As for the character-at-a-time display, iChat can provide something like that. On Mac OS X circa 10.6, select iChat > Accounts > select an account > and check the Send text as I type checkbox.

dmd3• 15 years ago

Again - it sends it in 'chunks' of 5 or 10 chars at a time, which is not what I want.

slug• 15 years ago

Here you go (real-time text transmitted in-band over an XMPP session):

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/07/07/2014214/Real-Time-Te...

sciurus2• 15 years ago

Could this easily be adapted for chats between the webpage visitor and a single other, predetermined user rather than many-user chatrooms? I've been looking for a web-embeddable open source chat client that could be used to power a support feature of a website.

mweibel3• 15 years ago

Well, you can try to do that. But it's focused on multi-user chatting. Maybe another software would be a better fit.

earnubs• 15 years ago

Chats are not dead yet

Related Stories