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:

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:

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:

Open Source Valentine

Last night my (young) son declared he wanted to make a Valentine’s card for someone in his class, and he wanted my help to make it so off to the Batcave!

…

Er, I mean my office.

Now my main machine (which runs Windows) was busy rendering video for a project, so I switched to my Ubuntu machine instead. I often tend to bypass Linux for media related stuff – I know it can handle most tasks, but I know that Windows definitely can do what I want and I’m more familiar with the applications. However due to time constraints (like bed time) I had no choice but to rely on the penguin.

First things first, he wanted a nice picture on the front, so Open Clip Art was my first port of call. We easily found a suitable image but it was in SVG format so instead of using the GIMP as I’d expected,  I  had to turn to Inkscape (I suppose I could have used Scribus but I didn’t think of it at the time). We knocked up a quick layout, and then it was time to print.

At this point I have to say that Inkscape’s print dialog sucks!

Frustrated by the inability to print I instead exported it to a PNG file, opened this in the GIMP and printed it from there to my printer (which incidentally was on another machine and networked via CUPS).

All of this (including installing Inkscape – thank you apt-get) was managed in a very short space of time, and my son was over the moon with it. I’m by no means a graphic artist or a designer so I can’t comment on the capabilities of the Free applications I mentioned here, but they allowed me to get the job done and I will have to invest more time in playing with them in the future.

Goodbye GMail

After much complaining about the state of my e-mail setup, and almost switching to Gmail (or rather GoogleMail as it has to be referred to in the UK) permanently even though I’d knocked it only shortly before that, I have now gone the other completely and for the time being suspended use of Gmail preferring instead to use my own setup.

Several factors help me make the switch:

Sitting round the Campfire

Last night I got to take part the performance testing 37signals were doing. Quite a few people who were in the chat with me were disapproving, claiming it was too basic, and that other web-based chats were better. I did keep pointing out to them that all this was being done in a pure HTML environment – no plugins required – but they still bemoaned the lack of features.

Hopefully today that should be dealt with as 37signals have released a screenshot of thhe app and a movie of the transcript browser that shows much of the functionality that I can happily confirm was missing from the test.

It looks like they have another winning application on their hands – I can see this being useful for all sort of discussions, and whilst it’s unlikely to win over anyone who uses IRC on a regular basis, it’s definitely more accessible and user-friendly than IRC.

I can imagine myself using it. Not exclusively, but certainly using it.

Beta Season

Although I find the underlying technologies and concepts very interesting, I’ve not yet bought into the whole Web 2.0 thing. Admittedly I’ve been trying out a lot of the services that fall under the 2.0 moniker, but I’m still not on the bandwagon.

I’ve recently been adding some new subscriptions to my blogroll (yes, I’ve stopped using gregarius for now – I need the mobile support Bloglines provides), and amongst them was Robert Scoble. He – and a lot of sites he links to – keep talking about up-and-coming new services, and two that are frequently mentioned are Newsvine and CoComment. Both of these are in the ‘closed’ beta stage where, just like GMail used to be (I believe it’s more open now), it’s by invite only¹. Being only mildly curious I put my name to receive notification when the service became available, but lo and behold less than 24 hours later I was given access to both! Not so ‘closed’ after all!

So far I’ve signed up to both, and given Newsvine more of a trial than CoComment. Although both seem like good solutions, I’ve got a feeling Newsvine will quickly become bogged down by the (always more vocal) negative members of the community, and as I tend not to comment on blogs much, and the blogs I do tend to comment on are either homegrown or not supported CoComment may be of (very) limited use to me.

There’s some good commentary of Newsvine and its ilk here:

The latter post has the following memorable comment:

¹ Yes I do have invites available for Newsvine.

The man they call Jayne

Your results:You are Jayne Cobb

Although you can be a good fighter and good at protecting others
you are not very bright sometimes.

Click here to take the “Which Serenity character am I?” quiz…

I was actually close to coming out as either Jayne, Mal or Wash. Guess something (a penchant for big guns perhaps?) tipped me over…

Pleasant Surprise

After my adventures in improving my Spamassassin setup last night, this morning I awoke to a pleasant surprise…

No spam!

It’s not perfect (I have a couple of custom procmail recipes that caught some stuff sa let through), but so far it’s the best it’s been since I switched distros on my server.

Now to see how it does over the course of the day…

Update

Just checked, and so far I’ve received 87 pieces of spam since I made the changes. Only two made it through Spamassassin, and they got caught by my procmail recipes.

In other words, I’ve not received a single piece of spam today.

Result!

Sensitive Skin

Inspired by Ade’s post on SPF I did a bit of digging. I wound up at this page which prompted me to strengthen my Spamassassin install with the following :

Now to see if they make any improvement…

Bold Move

News is starting to leak out that VMWare’s successor to GSX Server will be free. This is a significant and bold move from VMWare that will put more than a few noses out of joint. I’ve always been a big fan of VMWare Workstation, and it would seem that the release of their free Player was a precursor for this. Hopefully like their current offering – and Workstation and Player – it will support Linux.

Mike Gunderloy (a person whose opinion I – and many, many others – value) thinks this is a very good thing:

I’ve no doubt there will be an “Advanced Server” version that you do have to pay for, but I can imagine a lot of people trying – and sticking with – the free one.