Convore vs Banterly - Beaten to the punch

The culture/community of your product is as important as the tech. Myspace held out for a very long time because, for a while, their product was focused on a different set of users than Facebook. Convore -- right now -- attracts a lot of programmers, designers, startup junkies and other tech folks. There is plenty of room and the market is far from decided: 14 y/o girls (not kidding), moms, music fans, sports followers or whoever else.

There are also a lot of really good ideas that you can apply this technology toward. To me, the most uninspired way to attack this space is to try to make your site a one-stop portal for chat. There are a lot more possibilities if you can bring the chat to other destinations, or allow people to integrate chats with their sites.

You should be aware that being in the startup universe tends to make your worldview myopic. You're hyperfocused on the hundreds of users Convore might have and right now that looks like they are miles ahead. Zoom out for a minute and realize that there are millions of users to be won before this game is decided. You are both still at the very very early part of the curve.

Why the hell would you want to stop your project over the miniscule adversity of a pseudosimilar, vaguely-defined and -implemented platform that hasn't even gained traction yet?

If that's enough to make anyone quit a project, I don't think the startup scene is for that person.

For what it's worth, your project looks a lot more interesting. (Aside from the Flash.)

Build a team beyond yourself and forge ahead.

Thanks for your feedback! Very well put.

As we've been working on Banterly for the past few months, we've had a lot of the same thoughts. That's a big part of the reason we decided to focus our product on the Twitter community first. Our hope has been that as people discuss topics around various #hashtags that they will have a way to take the conversation to a deeper level rather than overwhelming their followers with @replies.

The comparisons to Convore are more at a feature level and prompted because many of our original ideas were geared toward giving the IRC community something more "up-to-date" (though it's hard to say whether or not open source programmers currently using IRC will ever really leave for anything else anyway).

We're working on that right now. We have persistent XMPP based chat with embed support. Try it out, my email is in my profile if you have any questions.

http://onehub.com/try/beta