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Ask HN: what do you use for instant/asynchronous communication?

8 points by jilebedev ↗ HN
Hello,

I'd like to know what instant chat tools HN folks favour for instant asynchronous communication.

I'm leaning against setting up an IRC server simply because graphical notifications would be nice. I would also prefer something open source, and possibly PHP based as I'd like to extend it and tie into our existing systems.

14 comments

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Toshio
I second the choice of IRC server, but for some setups it may be overkill. I personally like gobby/sobby, it has a chat module besides being a collaborative code editor. It's open-source and cross-platform.
SwearWord
I know you're leaning against it but I thought I'd say anyway that we use IRC for everything since it's easy to hook into from anywhere. We don't even use a full-fledged server, just a single file python script. There's plenty of options for graphical notifications and you can hook into from PHP if you want.
icebraining
We use Google Talk (it's just XMPP, so you can use an OSS client like Pidgin) and email. But you shouldn't discount IRC just because of that: many clients offer or at least let you add graphical notifications: my favorite client, Weechat[1], has plugins for libnotify/dbus, Growl and OS X Notification Center. I'm sure other clients offer similar functionality.

[1]: http://www.weechat.org/

sgk284
HipChat (https://www.hipchat.com/)

- It "just works" on every platform, including my phone.

- It's great for group chat and one-on-one.

- If someone @mentions me while I'm away or offline, it will send me an email and/or pop-up on my phone just like any other notification (all of this is configurable).

- You can use HubBot with it and it has GitHub integration.

- You can use it over XMPP if you need to.

I never thought I'd pay for a chat product given all of the free options out there, but it is just so good that I can't help but recommend it to everyone.

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richo
IRC is great because of the simplicity of bolting things to it.

We do all of our CI notifications and deployments with a bot in a builds channel.

With that said, Grove is going away and it doesn't look like there's a polished hosted alternative, so we're torn between setting up and managing our own internal system (which dollars per month will cost us more, once you put a dollar value on ops time) and trying to find something which will do what we want.

quesera
Ejabberd. I'm sure other XMPP servers are decent too.

PHP must have an XMPP library, python and ruby do, if not.

wink
We're using ejabberd at work as well. We're ~70 people and have got email address == xmpp handle, and we're using team-specific and general MUC chat rooms.

I do miss using IRC at this company, but at some point around 08 or 09 most people switched to Skype (as we'd used to for client communication anyway) and forsake IRC, but not all were happy with it. So in early 2011 (I think) we've had some polls and 3/4 preferred XMPP over Skype, so we switched. Personally I'm very happy with it.

My experiences with client libraries in PHP were horrible, though. xmppy (Python) and smack (Java) are much better.

stoked
Which xmpp client do you use?
alpeb
+1 for Hipchat. Outsourcing everything but the thing you're selling always makes sense, for productivity and security reasons, even more considering how cheap these services are nowadays and also knowing how crappy free php scripts tend to be.
khyryk
Which sort of graphical notifications are you looking for with IRC? XChat, for instance, has default options for system tray notifications when your name is mentioned, when you get a private message, when there's a new message in the channel, etc.