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Best IRC / Group Chat Service for Developers

2 points by zippyz ↗ HN
Our dev team is looking at using a group chat service and is leaning towards a hosted solution. I wanted to push for an ejabberd server, as I've used openfire in the past and it has a lot of stability issues.

As far as the hosted services here is my take:

Campfire: very feature rich. incredibly proprietary. works well by iteself, but wont work with adium or limechat without shitty bridges, adapters, electrical tape.

Grove: Simple, good. Crap support. Going out of business. Next.

Flowdock: Google wave take 2. Next!

Do you agree / disagree? Are there any better alternatives?

7 comments

[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 34.1 ms ] thread
tom_m
IRC. Don't over complicate things it leads to confusion and less productivity. Plus, it's free.
saiko-chriskun
Hipchat has been my go-to.
zippyz
it looks promising for sure.
shurane
How does it compare to other offers? Yammer, just plain IRC, etc?
mrtrosen
Grove is actually not going out of business, the folks at RevSys (Jacob Kaplan-Moss / Frank Wiles) have taken it over and have improved both stability and support issues... You might want to give it a closer look.