Kinda Like A Web Chat DJ Battle

Tue Feb 14 2006

My birthday was also the day of the Snakes and Rubies discussion/event at DePaul, and later that evening at my birthday party as I was getting drunk enough to try dropping a discussion of web development frameworks into my otherwise innocuous cocktail chatter, I framed the event as “kinda like a web frameworks DJ battle.” Sam noted that the point of the event wasn’t an us-versus-them, Ruby-vs-Python grudge match, and yet the crowd in attendence at S&R clearly wanted a battle to pit Ruby’s extreme dynamism against Python’s extreme pragmatism, to put things in terms of us versus them. Sometimes in the testosterone- and caffeine-fueled world of the web geek, it’s not enough to have found something you consider to be a superior solution — you’ve got to have the validation of seeing the other side crumble under the power of your awesomeness. If it cannot rock, it must therefore suck.

Which brings me to the latest tempest in a teapot: browser-based chat. 37signals is due to release their new “joint,” Campfire, any day now. But last Monday Google added a web-based interface to Google Talk to Gmail, and so by the end of the business day that Monday there were asshats commenting at Signal vs. Noise about how Google had (a) beaten Campfire to market and that (b) this had something to do with anything.

The problem with any comparison between Campfire and GTalk is that for all their similarities, they’re solutions to two different problems.

Campfire facilitates communication within a group of people: it’s a chat room where co-workers can get together, swap ideas and share files. It’s software for virtual meetings. The conversation itself becomes your whiteboard (and your meeting minutes, as transcripts are automatically saved), you can upload files in lieu of physical handouts and you can post links — the entire Web becomes your PowerPoint. Last weekend I found myself jonesing for Campfire as I was teaching a Dreamweaver class, just so I could post files in real time for my students to work on.

GTalk, by contrast, is for classic, person-to-person IM. The intriguing aspect of Google Talk is not the OMFG factor of Google doing browser chat, but the way that they’ve set it up as just one way of accessing their already fairly open IM network. You can communicate via Google Talk using a wide variety of desktop apps, but now you don’t even need to download anything. Just log into your Gmail account and go.

That freedom from downloading specialized software is a killer feature of both Campfire and Google Talk. I had an IM conversation yesterday with a friend who never uses IM, simply because her Gmail account got the chat feature and she saw me online. She didn’t have to face any of the usual IM roadblocks (‘Are we on the same chat network? Will this software download infect my computer with spyware?’) — she just clicked on my name and we talked. I was logged in via Adium, my favorite IM software for the Mac, and it didn’t matter that I wasn’t using a Google-developed piece of software or the chat feature of the Gmail website — it just worked. Installing AIM or another IM product isn’t exactly rocket science, but for ease of use nothing beats simply clicking a bookmark in your browser.

All that being said, if I were going to attempt an apples-to-apples comparison between GTalk and Campfire, I might point out that Google’s attempt to shoehorn an IM client into what I’ve so far considered the most elegantly designed e-mail application I’ve ever used is a little bit, well, dumb. I just don’t like the presentation of IM conversations as smallish “tabs” pinned to the bottom of the window, that can be minimized like buttons on a Windows taskbar. And I’m really not liking how Gmail automatically includes anyone you’ve ever e-mailed more than once in the new Quick Contacts list, forcing one to explicitly remove a bunch of people or else risk permanently cluttering my once-pristine Gmail experience. That I don’t like as much.

GTalk simply tries to do too much with too little screen space, whereas Campfire is most impressive to me for the way it makes perfect use of the browser window. I’ve never been 100% passionate about the Backpack user interface theme (that’s since been carried over to its sibling apps Writeboard and Basecamp). I mean, it’s always been solid and usable, but it’s always seemed lopsided to me in a way that’s left me cold.

Campfire uses a very similar theme, but the 37signals crew has made great use of scrolling boxes and fixed-positioned elements. I simply love the web-ness of it — they’ve made something elegant and intuitive that doesn’t waste a single pixel trying to pretend to be a desktop app, and instead just feels solid and comfortable in its skin. I’ve used Campfire a total of four or five times by now, and the interface is so intuitive that I feel like I’ve been using it for years. Chat in Gmail feels like a gimmick, while Campfire feels like a powerful tool.

However, apples to apples or oranges to pineapples, there’s one thing I thought of immediately after trying these two apps. Once upon a time, Microsoft was so afraid of an all-browsers-all-the-time future — where the operating system you used was irrelevant so long as you had a solid web browser — that they forced Netscape out of the business. As I started typing the phrase “…so long as you have Firefox” at some point during the writing of this essay, the irony made me smile.