As I was scanning tech.memeorandum's headlines for today, I saw an entry on Campfire. It was in 37 Signals' blog Signal vs Noise, and it helped crystalize this new service in a couple of ways.
First, are any of you as turned off to IRC as I am? Frankly, I never understood it, and if you read the wikipedia entry on it, you'll come across quite a few sentences as convoluted as this one:
"Because most IRC implementations use an acyclic graph as their connection model, there is no redundancy, and outage of a server or a link can cause a netsplit."
Well, there was, and is, no way that I'm going to figure out how to use IRC. The developers at 37 Signals evidently feel the same way I do, because Campfire is their answer to it. Basically, they dropped an IRC-like real-time chat service into a web browser thus making it simple to use for the rest of us.
TIP: If you use your Campfire chat rooms for your internal company use, and you invite a third party in to collaborate on content or a design issue, invite them as a guest to a specific room. If you invite them to become a member, instead of a guest, they'll have access to all of your rooms.
The developers at 37 Signals say they're going to be working on fixing that little detail in the near future.
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