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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Last I tried HipChat, it was a terrible experience simply because I wanted to not run yet another application and instead use Adium. They do support XMPP but to get it working you have to do magic. After I did the magic, I had chat up and running but lo and behold: file transfers did not work. Thankfully, this is when our team decided the experiment was over. We went back to using IRC. What fundamental problem do these new chat protocols solve that are not already addressed by IRC and XMPP?

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HipChat is incredible compared to IRC.

Out of the box you get:

  1. 1-on-1 messaging
  2. Private and public chat rooms
  3. A client that works on mobile, desktop, and web.
     No matter where I am, I'm connected to my team.
  4. Persistent and searchable history.
  5. Real-time notifications if someone mentions
     you while offline.
  6. You can copy and paste screenshots directly into
     the room. We use this all of the time for gui
     mockup discussions.
  7. Integration with most online services like
     GitHub, etc...
  8. Easy file transfers.
  9. No servers to manage.
  10. Easy user management.
  11. Video calls.
  12. Voice calls.
  13. Screen sharing.

Most importantly, it all just works. We could get IRC to do much of the above, but it'd be a hodgepodge of a solution and require someone to spend time setting it all up and maintaining it. At $2/user/month HipChat is a no-brainer. Why waste engineering resources trying to solve problems that someone else already solved for us?

Edit: And custom emoticons. Can't forget those. That's the best part of HipChat.

Some of those are legitimate points, but quite a few apply equally to IRC. Namely, 1, 2, 3, and 9.

I've found using hipchat with coworkers to be much nicer than using XMPP with coworkers mostly for it being closer to IRC: there are rooms where most discussion takes place, so you can get to know people by lurking there, and when you need to 1:1 message someone, you probably have some context about who they are, which makes a world of difference to an introverted new hire. The realtime team-wide chat just makes everything feel much more friendly, imho.

I'm sure it's possible to get that setup with XMPP, and it's definitely possible to get an equivalent setup with IRC (which I have an external server running ZNC for), but it's not out of the box, and there is something to be said for having a good configuration set up and working for everyone out of the box.

Persistence. It's nice to be able to see what conversations you missed while offline or overnight, especially if you have teammates distributed across the globe.

Persistence also allows you to search through or link people to old conversations.

So XMPP lets you do this too. Why invent a new protocol?

Because a company feels there is money to be made by offering a simpler solution to interested customers.

Does every product really need a technical justification? If every person at your company is comfortable setting up email clients, IRC bots, and bouncers, then this isn't a product for you.

If you would rather just pay someone $2/person/month to set this up for you, then this is the product for you.

It needs some kind of justification, otherwise it will die. HipChat being offered for free may extend it's life, but I still don't see a point. Everyone has access to GChat, so 99% of the problems are already solved. The dev shops would probably rather use IRC especially since the experience for power users is so terrible. That does not leave room for HipChat in this world.

My company just moved from a GChat-centric XMPP system to an all-in HipChat system. We don't have Google Apps because we have our own Exchange server, so not everyone gets a sane email address that can also be used as their GChat handle, so we've all relegated to using personal or work-specific personal Gmail accounts.

Just last week we onboarded a new developer and instead of having to spread her personal GChat address all over the company and make sure that everyone has authorized her to speak to them, and worked out the kinks for the few (like me) who run their own XMPP server that play russian roulette on whether Google is going to allow federation today... we just sent her a link to a URL which allowed her to create a user and immediately started downloading a client that once authenticated, connected her to the entire company.

Granted, we could have used our internal IRC server (we actually do have one set up), but the maintenance behind it really started to get to us. In order to use it we had to VPN in and connect, and backlog wasn't available to people that aren't technical enough to understand shell clients (like our project managers). When we did decide to open up the security permissions we had spam bots connecting 24/7 trying to get into our channel, which we then had to password protect, which ended up being another piece of tribal knowledge that "you just had to know".

Still, I continue to have Campfire (Flint.app), HipChat, Adium with XMPP for OTR, Google Hangouts for multi-person conferencing, Email, irssi and Twitter open all day. I wish I could consolodate them all into one, but I can't because they all have specific use cases. If HipChat was to allow an OTR plugin and multi-person video chats and screen sharing, that'd get rid of 4 of my communications^W daily distractions, but it wouldn't get rid of all of them because they serve different purposes.

At the very least, HipChat being free is a much better argument against using Lync now.

Overnight is covered by leaving a client running, with logging. Offline is covered by using a BNC[0]. These solutions are years old, but perhaps less user-friendly than hipchat.

There are a plethora of IRC clients to choose from one various platforms, but there's only the one hipchat. IRC is also an open protocol.

So, hipchat's only real chance is trying to be the Apple of IRC--they must nail UX and marketing to the tech-hapless to have a real chance.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_(software)

That's pseudo-persistence, and it's only as stable as the client or bouncer. HipChat and Slack provide actual, stateless history, so you can reboot, logout, sign in from a mobile device, whatever, and pick up where you left off, with notifications in the meanwhile.

irc is great for a company that consists solely of developers + devops who've been bearding it up for 10+ years.

however, for the rest of the world, if you work with a non-dev team (think sales, marketing, customer support), you will really frustrate them when you tell them: "the question you just asked was answered at 3am last night, if you just scrollback..."

...god forbid you lose power (like san francisco in a heat wave last week)

or you could just choose to really frustrate your IT person(s) by telling them they need to install and maintain irc clients + bncs across multiple operating systems for your users, that automatically start up and join the right channels when the user logs in.

or you could just frustrate all of your mobile users by draining their battery (and potentially their data plan) by telling them to stay connected to irc 24/7 from their phones via a mobile irc client, or hold a companywide training session on how to install an ssh client + screen-reattach + navigate irssi from a touchscreen phone.

or you could further frustrate your users by telling them irssi includes search as long as they learn the syntax of /lastlog.

i'm not even going to touch screenshots.

user-friendly > neckbeard.

pay the $X/mo per user for slack/hipchat

-versus-

paying $XX to $XXX/hour per user to provide them with the requisite knowledge foundation and ongoing support to use your arcane chat methodology that hates noobs.

We've had chat + persistence for decades, and called it email (or perhaps usenet or listserv, for groups).

The fundamental problem they "solve" is to be more hip and cool than the last, since no regular human being has heard of IRC, let alone many "hardcore programmers" that I know.

I wish IRC was overhauled SOMEHOW and made more accessible to the common person.

I never understood how IRC was somehow not accessible. Connect to a server, join a room, (usually from a helpfully provided list), enter text and other people see it. Those are the basics, and my gran could understand them.

It's no more difficult than browsing the web.

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