Grove.io was a hosted IRC chat service for teams; its blog covers beta launch, API, Hubot integration, and eventual shutdown.
Commenters mention it as a service making 'real IRC' available to many, though hosted, and sometimes confuse it with Convore's related product.
Hi all,
Convore co-founder here.
The company, Convore, is still very much alive and well.
However, we're currently working on a new, but related, product (https://grove.io/). We're still alpha testing it with a few users, but hope to have it out there soon.
Grove is a little more developer-focused, and my co-founders really wanted to work on a mainstream project. So yes, the Erics left Convore to start a new project, Can't Wait!, an iPhone app for watching new movie trailers.
That being said, the Convore iPad app by jazzychad is fantastic. jazzychad is a really smart guy and an excellent developer and I hope he has a great time working at Twilio (a pretty cool company themselves). I predict the future for jazzychad will be bright. :D
Well, originally there was a IRC gateway for Slack. But at the end of the day, it just lessens the experience for everyone. I'm all for open protocols in theory, however I'm yet to see it go well since it only works if every platform implements every feature in almost the same way... and at that point, you might as well just use the same client.
Some of the benefits of Slack are things like:
- the rich integrations
- emoji responses + emoji statuses
- video calls that "just work"
- good search (for stored knowledge across a company)
- pinned messages
- notifications people are snoozed and the ability to force a notification
(That being said, https://grove.io attempts to do this!)
We migrated from a self-hosted irc server to Grove and couldn't be happier. The archive and search are a godsend when you can't be bothered to set up loggers and such yourself. Whenever we're troubleshooting server issues, all the context is already there in the web client for other devs to hop right in and catch up. We post to the API from our fab deploy scripts, and when someone's feeling motivated, we'll be setting up Hubot, as outlined on their blog. https://grove.io/blog/hubot-grove
EDIT: I should also give mention to the great transparency from the team. Leah emailed me in response to feedback/issues multiple times, and they definitely keep up with Twitter chatter.
"Grove is here to stay"... clicks link
> curl -i https://grove.io/blog/grove-here-stay
HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
Server: nginx/1.1.17
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2012 17:33:13 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 193
Connection: close
<html>
<head><title>500 Internal Server Error</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>500 Internal Server Error</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx/1.1.17</center>
</body>
</html>
Well, hopefully they get it on it's feet again. But it's good to hear!
https://hall.com also supports WebRTC based video chatting and private channels.
GitHub hooks have been implemented but as of yet there isn't a
proper web API available.
It definitely seems interesting though.
Edit: if something slick on top of vanilla IRC would be sufficient you could check out https://grove.io as well.
That's a fair criticism. I know https://grove.io/ does great work in making 'real IRC' available to the masses, but it's still hosted. It would be nice if they would release their web-client as open source, or if someone wrote an OSS clone.