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bovermyer
This is actually pretty cool. I'd be curious to see how well it's adopted, though, since the majority of dev chat that I see occurs in IRC.
trevorah
Yeah, we're currently building an irc bridge so that you can use it with your irc client of choice.
guptaneil
Looks nice, but what's the value prop over something like HipChat, which already integrates with a lot of different services?

For example, we currently use HipChat and feed in GitHub, New Relic, AirBrake, and CircleCI notifications into HipChat. How will Gitter improve that workflow?

mydigitalself
hi @guptaneil,

we provide a much deeper level of integration with GitHub, and also have integrations with Travis, Jenkins, Trello and are working on more. our issue mentioning and markdown are two really great features built for developers.

there are a few other advantages, for one we handle both free open source projects as well as private conversations. so you can have all of your chat in one place.

for people adopting a new chat programme, inheriting your "social graph" in the form of your org members and repos you belong to/watch/star also means that getting up and running with gitter is really fast and simple.

facorreia
It's an interesting concept and could provide an alternative to IRC for GitHub projects.

I've subscribed with an account I created specifically for Gitter. I definitely won't grant the level of access to my account that Gitter asks for currently[1].

[1] https://gitter.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/200176672-Authe...

emillon
Do you know if something similar exists for mailing lists?

ie for every github project you get a project mailing list to discuss development on a higher level than individual bug reports.

trevorah
So something a little more formal than chat?
emillon
With longer messages and asynchronous, so basically email. It seems to me that mailing lists solve a different problem than chat or bug trackers. They allow to discuss about the project itself, which is necessary if you have > 1 main dev. That's something that sourceforge did and github does not, probably by design. Maybe something like discourse could work for that.
kevinatari
Been using Gitter with my Dev Group for a few weeks and we all love it and switched completely to it as our main Chat. It's worth a try and the integration of services like Trello and - for sure - Github is just great! Also Auto-Embedded Links (YouTube, SoundCloud, images (jpg, png, gif)). Really love it and I'm looking forward to the apps. :)
michaelmior
Is there any way to join a chat for a public repository which you are not a contributor to?
trevorah
If that chat has already been created, then going to gitter.im/[org]/[repo] should be enough.
myersgp
This is one of those ideas that seems so obvious. The solution looks great and the interface is solid. By the way, I'm +1 on emillon's mailing list idea
davexunit
Ditch IRC for a proprietary web application? No thanks.
mydigitalself
we're actually working on an IRC bridge.

always interested in this position though. it's far more feature rich than IRC, in our opinion a better experience.

schmavery
Office Space references always a nice touch!
martiuk
Any word on either a. an android client or b. an API to make an android client with?
mydigitalself
Both are on the radar, but not sure on timing yet.
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ixmatus
The upside of IRC is not having to have so many different applications to chat with all the different people.

If I can use XChat for this, that would be bad-ass. Also, one important feature I think would be crucial is integrating with Google Chat (if you can). All developers use IRC or HipChat or Kato but then I have to deal with the buggers in the rest of my company that like to use GChat!

mydigitalself
we're busy working on IRC integration right now!
ixmatus
Awesome, I definitely like this concept a lot and the other commenter's reply about a mailing list would go very well with this concept.
tvon
That's one hell of an authorization request. I see the reasoning in the sidebar, but I'm not really willing to take that kind of chance to try out a new chat service.