I've always sort of wondered who uses Campfire... Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's a bad product, but it's never struck me as something that was really missing from either my work life or my personal life.
It only makes sense if you are in the 37Signals work universe already... If you have Basecamp, and you spend a lot of your time on your Basecamp page, using Campfire to chat with others who are in your Basecamp page makes a lot of sense - especially if you are behind various corporate firewalls that might block other chat/IM clients.
Strong disagree; most of the Matasano people who use Campfire have little or no exposure to other 37signals products.
It's just a very solid, inexpensive private web chat that we don't have to host ourselves. It works everywhere, unlike IRC, SILC, and AIM, which almost everyone filters. It is completely brilliant for conducting meetings. We're all smart people; could we have built a substitute? Sure, if we wanted to be in the chat business.
Fair enough, although it raises the question - is its obscurity its entire comparative advantage? I suppose additionally, since it is a paid product (with the free version having severe limitations) it is unlikely to be popular enough to draw the ire of the IT folks, and everyone has a client installed already (browser).
IRC is an ancient, rickety piece of crap, and a disproportionate amount of IRC server functionality addresses problems most people do not have, like synchronizing multiple relay servers. I grew up on IRC, have spent a lot of time in the ircd source code, and I can't imagine why anyone would waste time using it in 2009.
So, I think along with "time" and "expertise", you should also add "tolerance for needless pain".
You know, last time I checked, the BSD devs were still using icb. Maybe Campfire is also for the people without the time or expertise to set up icb. =)
You're on crack. IRC is not the most used groupchat protocol on the Internet. Most Internet users have never heard of IRC, but the overwhelming majority of them have an IM address somewhere that does group chat.
By "in use on millions of websites", I presume you're cheating by saying that any website that mentions IRC is "using" IRC.
If you were building a website, would you use HTML, which completely sucks and is an abomination, or would you create a fantastic new system with its own browser?
I'm doing some IRC stats for langpop.com, and if you want technical help, someplace like Freenode is still the place to be. Where can you get Ruby help on IM?
It's not my fault you're building a company on a protocol from 1989. =)
You know, I made the same mistake in 1998; we started (and got funded) a company that basically took IRC and:
* Added arbitrary TLV encoded data to messages
* Used link state routing to solve the netsplit problem
* Used FEC to provide reliability over the resulting mesh network
But even though you've kept current on IRC and I wrote it off a long time ago, I'm pretty sure I can still win an argument that IRC is archaic and ready to go.
Oh I totally agree, the world did not need a BitTorrent/IRC combination in 1999, or in 2009.
But the world certainly wants to be able to upload files and images into group chats. No user cares about IRC; they want group chat to be easy as using a website.
My 1999 startup did not fail because I made the wrong bet about the ancient IRC protocol. IRC isn't "growing" just because you stuck a web front end on it and started counting page views. Like I said, the overwhelming majority of your users could care less what the protocol is behind it.
You are the opposite of right; IRC is dying, and will be replaced with web chat systems with backend protocols nobody thinks about.
Why would I count page views? Counting profit is much more fun.
I think you'll see an explosion in online webchat this year and next, and IRC will be one of the clear winners.
I don't like the protocol, it's a complete mess to be honest, but that's what'll happen.
