Putting out the Campfire
So 37signals have launched their new “simple group chat for business” product Campfire – don’t try to signup for it though, because it’s limited to 500 users a day and I fully expect it to mimic the 360 shortages for a while.
Whilst scanning Technorati for posts about Campfire, I came across Jim Coudal’s invite to join their room as a guest. It was locked when I first tried, but later I got in and Jason Fried himself was in there. I asked him a few questions about how he thought the launch had gone, and when they were going to allow more signups to which he replied:
signups are on. go for it. we opened 1000 more slots.
So I did, and now have a shiny new trial account. I’ve given the tyres a kicking with some of the #lugradio faithful, and they seem impressed with it although as regular IRC’ers they’re not the target market. Tomorrow I’ll try it with some people I work (i.e. not die hard geeks) to see what they think.
I got a chance to play with Campfire the other day, and I said:
It looks like they have another winning application on their hands â?? I can see this being useful for all sort of discussions, and whilst itâ??s unlikely to win over anyone who uses IRC on a regular basis, itâ??s definitely more accessible and user-friendly than IRC.
I still stand by that, and I’m sure they will make a lot of money from it (although my reaction is why pay for what is already available for free), but I’m now thinking “why re-invent the wheel”?
One of the problems with the whole web 2.0 culture is walled gardens. Sure some (maybe even most) of the apps have an API of some sort for you to interact with them, but generally you’re only allowed to play in their little world. Campfire is a prime example of this. There are open standards that Campfire could have been built on top of – they’re good enough for Google after all – that would have saved 37signals the whole wheel re-inventing bit and allowed their applications to interact with other services (if they so desired, but it’s not a requirement – Google Talk was closed at first) and also allowed people who are more comfortable with desktop applications to participate. On the Campfire site they have a page explaining why it’s better than your current choice of IM/chat, but it’s all marketing and anyone with any moderate computer experience will know that there are already clients and networks that provide a large part of what they’re saying doesn’t exist.
Campfire does have some very nice features, and I’d like to see a competing application (not a service) that implements some of these on top of XMPP.
Any takers?
Update
It looks like I’m not the only one who is underwhelmed:
