I am still thinking since the files stored on Hipchat are public ( with a long and hard to guess URL ). What are HN's take on this?
HipChat is now free for teams of 5 users or fewer
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Re: HipChat is now free for teams of 5 users or fewer
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest difference is that HipChat is primarily about "rooms" and less about messaging individual people (although you can do that too). It makes for much better team workflow, because it enables a lot more passive information sharing. Most people in a room don't want to be actively involved in everything, but they would like to passively just see what's going on. Secondly, it's centralized around a company, so y…
Rooms can be created on Skype, that's the way we use skype in our business, we create a group chat between all the relevant people and then favorite it and it's the same as a room. The contact list issue is good I think for larger companies especially in the beginning. I'm wondering about how the integrations could be used in our business, and I'm also wondering if we can integrate our software with HipChat
I think the difference is that rooms are a focus of HipChat, and an afterthought / hack in Skype. Similar to how individual, "not in a room" conversation is an afterthought in HipChat.
In both cases you can technically do it, but the app doesn't go out of it's way to make it easy or well-supported. If you find you're using your favorited lists to chat more than one-on-one conversations, I'd really recommend trying out HipChat.
For what it's worth, we regularly use Skype at our office as well as HipChat. They both excel at what they were designed to do, and we don't necessarily see a problem with using two tools if it means you don't have to shove a round peg into a square hole.
Re: HipChat is now free for teams of 5 users or fewer
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
We use http://partychapp.appspot.com (it was recommended on a previous HN posting). We already used Google Talk for one on one chats so this just adds a group chat into that, and works really well. It also doesn't require additional clients, doing group chats differently than one on one, yet more usernames and passwords etc.
Used to use this, then it was always down. Now use http://Jaconda.im . Always just works, has a convenient web interface as well for great room history.
We switched last night to Jaconda - thanks for the recommendation. While partychat never failed for us, it did prove limiting (eg no search) and seemed increasingly unmaintained (/commands not working). Jaconda also has Github integration which was nice.