So, there was a time, where if I wanted several someones to get together to chat, I’d find an IRC
server and start a channel, and that would be that. Of course, at that time, pretty much everyone I knew was a reasonably hard-core geek (or was friends with one), and had a shell account.
I know that there are these modern-day things like GUI IRC clients and Facebook chat and whatnot. Let’s assume an IRC server won’t work (mostly because I don’t want to run one, and don’t want to invite a bunch of neophytes to other peoples’ servers). Real-time multi-person Facebook chat is kind of painful (and besides, a lot of people are running hither and yon with fear regarding the new chat app).
What’s a group of people to do, who are looking for the following:
- Real-time text chat.
- The ability to have it reasonably private (the equivalent of +ln in IRC, perhaps?)
- Probably via a web interface, though something that had clients for Mac / Windows / mobile wouldn’t suck
Basically, we wanna be able to sit around and talk, and have people wander in and out, or camp, or … well, you know. IRC.
Once upon a time, there were AIM chat rooms. But, at the time I was using them, they were super-s33kr1t employee-only sort of things, and required a call to a very annoyed person in the NOC to create and/or reset when they went haywire (which they did with some frequency). Did they ever roll that out as a product?
Y’all are going to point me to gtalk / gchat / Google Hangouts, aren’t you? Do they even do text-versions of that? Or multi-people text versions?
Anyway, I’d love to hear what the Hivemind has to say.
![[PSA] If you’re using Firefox, particularly on Windows, stop doing that.](http://www.covert-ops.org/wp-content/themes/songwriter-premium/images/slide.jpg)
http://blast.aim.com/ is what AIM uses to create private IM chat rooms. Basically you IM the room ID and it gets broadcasted to everyone logged in and invited for the room. Never had an issue with it bugging out on me when using it for messaging in a work environment.
Hmmm. I was just interviewing my technogeek teenager about what is “out there” these days that is most like a “chat room.” He didn’t come up with this, so I guess I will have something cool to show HIM for once!
Reddit.
talk
nvchat
More seriously, people I’ve talked to professionally mostly seem to use Skype.
Dunno. But every company who managed to rope me into some kind of IM-type chat over the past couple of years has insisted on Skype. This includes places like Alcatel-Lucent (who are quite large) and Mulesoft (who are quite large in their sort of mid-sized pond) and a couple of other companies I won’t name (both large and small). I had to jump through a bunch of hoops to recover my old Skype password. 😛
I still use IRC quite heavily. even use it regularly at work, though now it seems that we’re migrating toward Slack as a concession to normies who don’t want to bother with setting up a persistent client or agent.
Slack has a bunch of other cool features, but it’s really aimed at workgroups who need everything persistent and indexed rather than just chatting…
I need to get back on IRC
HipChat?
Still IRC all the time.
I second Colloquy.
I still use IRC, but that’s only for technical topics and questions.
Have you tried hipchat? It’s not command line BUT there’s a hipchat client for linux. I use it.
The particular group I’m playing around with is trying out a group Skype chat, with some success. I have, however, signed up for several new accounts at various places, to try out all these nifty new things!
Many thanks for all the input.
I’m also kind of surprised that nobody mentioned jabber. Is that because I stated I wasn’t interested in running an IRC server, so it’s assumed I’d also be similarly disinclined to run a jabber server? Or is jabber wildly deprecated for everything but gtalk?
Mary Alderdice: I did recommend jabber. Hipchat is a jabber server you don’t have to run yourself And you can connect to it with Adium/Pidgin/.. or whatever client you want. Including clients for mac/windows/linux, and a web based client if you don’t want to download anything.
http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64436-how-to-connect-using-adium
Huh! That’ll teach me not to finish reading / digesting everybody’s comments before babbling on. 🙂
I was using pidgin to connect to googletalk, IRC and Hipchat at the same time. But I’ve since switched (just last week) to running the linux native client. It’s pretty much exactly like the mac native client. But you can use whatever you want…. oh and it’s free. A paid account gets you video support.
https://blog.hipchat.com/2014/05/27/hipchat-is-now-free-for-unlimited-users/
Huh. Neat. If the Skype experiment fails, I may try to drag people over there. In the meantime, I’ll definitely be checking it out for myself. Many thanks!
Just sent you a skype invite