It looks like Campfire has soft launched:
Some have asked who will buy this with GMail Talk, Meebo and the other slew of web based chats out there.
Their movie shows that they thought that too:
I think the key is integration. As a user of their other products (Basecamp etc), I would love Campfire to integrate, and have a holistic experience.
Congrats on the launch to the 37S folk. Nice and clean as always. You can tell it is a 37Signals application :)
Update:
I decided to use it for a couple of days. I do like the notion of a chat room living all the time (I am an IRC user old school guy after all. I was even an IRC operator back in the day ;).
Without that in IM, my company just knows to join channel “NAME_WE_USE” in the morning, so isn’t a huge deal, apart from the history piece.
One of the problems with the web interface though is that I can’t tell when people join, say something, leave the room. As a company we often sit on the chat room for a long time and then someone will “ping: hey have a question for you”. This use case doesn’t work great yet, so if Campfire allowed you to have visual/audio cue’s it would be there on that front.
February 15th, 2006 at 10:26 pm
For us, the key is that GMail is “just” IM. Meaning that it has the same problems as IM has ever had and that we seek to address with Campfire for group chat. We did the pro/con thing at http://www.campfirenow.com/better/
February 20th, 2006 at 2:57 am
Oh, I remember your irc days, Brit..you and Pepsi. ;)