Yes, Leafy Chat was a totally separate project built by myself, Alex Gaynor, and Chris Wanstrath for the Django Dash a couple years ago. Leafy Chat was a pure web IRC client. Convore is inspired by IRC but not based on the protocol and functions a bit differently. For example, Convore has the concept of topics, which is not in IRC.
I've been hanging out on Convore for a few weeks and they're definitely on to something - it's entirely replaced Twitter as my online water cooler. In a way it's similar to IRC, but the ability to create new topics which have their own chatroom-style thread (while still being alerted to conversations elsewhere) means you can duck out and come back again a few days later and pick up the same conversation.
Isn't this essentially what Chatterous tried?
No, Chatterous is about multi-modal communication and a single chatroom per group. Convore creates a new room per topic, providing the organization of forums with the immediacy of chatrooms.
This would be great for use inside our company, but only if it's on the Yammer model where everything is company-private. Don't want staff to have to go through hundreds of external groups, just want them to see ours.
If Convore is like IRC, what we need is a private IRC server. Is there any service like that? (Campfire ain't it)
I agree the new features are really useful but would also argue that there is an Evaporative Cooling Effect ( http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-... ) taking place - there is hardly any noise on Convore at present. Even with a carefully maintained follow list on twitter I still get so much noise in my stream that I no longer check it regularly.
We've been on convore for a few weeks and for certain things it is starting to replace HN for me. There's generally enough high-quality HN-caliber folks to have a quick and intelligent discussion about MongoDB on AWS or whatever, something I always wanted #startups on IRC to be. Careful though: could be addictive as hell. ;)
Is this just because it was announced here, and is that likely to continue? One of the key problems with IRC is that in a world where anyone can participate, the cool places to go are the places everyone wants to be, which means that you need advanced moderation mechanisms, which in the IRC ecosystem translates to numerous channel and user modes, bots for automated moderation, and network-wide services for overall control. I don't see Convore being well positioned on any of these fronts.