eoffermann

hah! Yeah - I know... It started just as "helpdesk" and "bam" (because I liked the sound of "Bam!" better than "Ban!" (for Kanban) and I hadn't thought it was going to grow beyond maybe my "Slack Replacement". But once I called it "Banter" it was all downhill from there.

While I've tried to keep scaling in mind so huge businesses could use it, I think the real sweet spot for it is smaller distributed workgroups. I'd be less interested in seeing a 20,000 employee company adopt it than 500 companies with 50 employees, each.

And I really want to reinvent voice/video "calling". I think "calling" is a weird, old paradigm and rarely needs to be done through its own standalone app. If we're collaborating on the same thing, we should just be able to talk. If we're in the same #channel, we should just be able to talk. I shouldn't need to get in Zoom or Discord or something to chat while we draw on a whiteboard.

Thanks! It's the product of several things for me - one, I hate that everything wants to have its own "Co-pilot" chat interface and am afraid that easy win will turn into a standard. The ideal thing about agents is that they can have responsibilities and you don't have to instruct them constantly. The number of times that I've wanted to ask Gemini to summarize this email for me is closer to zero than 100.

So I like MCP for this - agents can have their responsibilities, receive events, take action; if you need to chat with one, you can do that in the same interface you'd chat with a colleague.

And the other is that I hate how "voice/video chat" is still "another app". If we're both looking at the same Kanban board, we should just be able to talk without a bunch of negotiation. We're here, online, together in this project, on this app, so why can't we just talk? Give me an icon that lets me talk to anybody that's "in the room" so to speak. It should all be like that, so... it's headed that direction.

You know... As it turns out, that's a different piece of software! (I was super confused at the comment and had to google it.)

My company, and long before that just the website I used to host different projects on, is "BigBlueCeiling" so I tend to default to "BigBlue_________" for project names or offshoots now.

I'm a huge fan of FOSS in general though. And if BigBlueBam found life inside of education I wouldn't hate it.

I either used Caffeine (the app, not just the chemical) or a mouse jiggler the whole time I worked for them because it seemed like I was always trying to keep a laptop running on something. This was super common in research environments - so hopefully they're good about collecting mouse data from the people working on Instagram or something and steer clear of the teams they're already ruining.