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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/

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

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

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.

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.

You can just link directly to a server/chatroom on mibbit. No need for your users to ever see their frontpage.

Their chat-interface isn't better either.

Honestly, would you send a mibbit link in a professional context to an non-nerd contact?

Well, that was a rhetoric question... The colors are terrible, the whole thing looks like a relic from the 90s and there's way too much tech exposed.

It's IM that uses the right transport protocol. GUI matters to users, and that's plain IM GUI.

Fixed my earlier post.

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. ;-)

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.

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

http://tinychat.com/anythinghere

has audio/video also

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

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