This is currently 2nd, and is written with the idea of helping people form communities on top of a proprietary system.
Slack seems like it might be a good thing for companies, but for public stuff, I'll continue to stick with IRC.
I'll add: this site seems like a cool idea and good work by whoever created it, but I'm just averse to building on that particular foundation.
-No single point of failure.
-No dependency on a different company for a vital points of your business.
-No private info stored on a 3rd party system, in a different state and potentially a different country (legal nightmare to ask for damages).
-Distributed system. Local servers give lower lag for multisite companies, internet access outage means netsplit, not inability to communicate.
-Already existing indexing and searching features if desired.
-Many bots to automate/notify/interact with insane amounts of stuff.
-Thousands of IRC clients, with enormous customizing features, for every conceivable platform, that do as much and even more than all these "this is how communication should be" solutions.
-Bridging IRC to XMPP/Sametime/etc plugins/apps to interoperate with other companies.
I can sort of understand Slack for a small company, but if you have your own server infrastructure, no, I can't.
If you have absolutely nothing better to do with your time, it's a great idea to do this yourself.
For the rest of us who are actually trying to grow businesses rather than set up IRC servers, there's HipChat and Slack.
For something purely internal for a company, that makes sense to me. It's the public, 'general interest' kinds of things where I'd avoid building on something proprietary if possible.
Seems like a good place to mention, on Freenode:
* #startups - pretty informal and sometimes a lot of noise with little signal, but occasionally something good, too.
* #bootstrappers - a channel I'm trying to get going. Not much there yet!
> For the rest of us who are actually trying to grow businesses rather than set up IRC servers, there's HipChat and Slack.
For the rest of us who are actually trying to grow businesses rather than set up <insert company IT infrastructure> there's this <insert proprietary platform>.
I've heard that before from people who don't blink to have their own Gitlab/Bugzilla/Jenkins/Whatever. It's overly short sighted to dedicate resources for development support IT infrastructure, but consider resources for development communication a waste of time.
I've found Openfire + Spark IM to be a reasonable alternative sitting between the customizable and the convenient, and it's open source.
For that matter I always wondered why someone can't do the same with git and watching files, instead of proprietary clients like dropbox.
You might want to have a look at git-annex (assistant or otherwise, I use both) http://git-annex.branchable.com/
> I can sort of understand Slack for a small company, but if you have your own server infrastructure, no, I can't.
This seems to be based on the assumption that IRC is anywhere near as feature-rich as a web-based chat client, but it isn't. If you could point me to an OS X IRC client that isn't absolutely terrible (and please do, I'd really love one), I'd be happy to give it a shot, but even with all of the above perceived advantages of IRC, Flowdock still wins for me. Every team I've worked on that's switched to it has had a marked uptick in productivity.
It also has a higher barrier of entry, since you have to find and likely install a client, find a server to connect that client to, and know what channels to join in order to find conversation (assuming your IT policy isn't blocking IRC ports, and the irc server doesn't require ident auth). Most IRC client UIs are still inspired by irssi, high in utility and information density, but low in glamor. Monospaced fonts are typically the default.
Slack doesn't require any of these things, you click a button on a website, enter your name, and are put right into general chat. The UI is carefully designed and aesthetically pleasing. Since entire groups are topic specific, you don't have to go looking for the specific room you want. Slack removes the burden of choice.
There's not enough being done to resolve this problem for IRC. IrcCloud has tried to solve the client problem, putting it all in a browser, eliminating the networking aspect, and making the UI as pleasing as they can, but there's nothing to be done for the discovery issue that doesn't also hamstring IRC power users.
And $5/month per user for the team plan would quickly add up! So irccloud for work would simply be too expensive; and that's just the client. Private IRC server (as a service) won't be cheap either. Or could run it myself but then I'd also have to maintain it myself.
Slack hits the sweet spot. There's nothing to maintain, the barrier to entry for non-technical people is low. The apps are great and so is the web version. It evokes the feeling of IRC and adds convenience of instant messaging (e.g. @-mentions, notifications; irccloud does mentions and notifications too which makes it really good).
So yeah, Slack is a cage, but a golden one. With a comfortable plush sofa and freshly brewed coffee. I can hang out there with friends and do some work...
UI improvements are coming up to make the most IRC actions usable via the UI which will make a huge improvement over many IRC options out there.
Disclaimer: I'm a Kiwi IRC dev.
Definitely love Slack for team communication but I don't think it would work as well for public chat.