Today we have a guest post from David Shoemaker. He’s here to tell us about his company’s new tool ShopTalk. Basically it’s like a group instance message in your browser, only better. We also have 100 free passes to give away. I’ll let David explain it.
My daily commute involves the freeway. Every day I drive to a large office building which sits on an even larger campus of a Big Corporation. I walk up to the third floor and weave my way through offices and cubicles, touching my security badge to no less than three electronic wall sensors to unlock doors along the way. My team of 12 engineers is scattered around the third floor. This is all in stark contrast to my last job — where I was working at a startup on a far-flung team of six engineers who worked in five different states — but it’s not as bad as you might think.
I see my coworkers face-to-face every day. We eat lunch together and hang out in the halls chatting. We talk about work most of the time. The most common question is, “What are you working on?” The answer is usually followed by, “Oh, cool,” and then, “Have you looked at my work for such-and-such project? I think you could reuse some of it.” Frequently an eavesdropping coworker will emerge from his office to join the conversation, eager to share advice. Those hallway conversations are incredibly useful and time-saving. That is exactly what the teleworker often lacks. That collective wisdom, two-heads-are-better-than-one sharing of knowledge and experience that happens so naturally in an office just doesn’t take place when your only communication with your coworkers is weekly conference calls with strict agendas.
Luckily, conference calls needn’t be your only communication channel. At my last job we used IRC. I was glad to see Zack recommend IRC here on The One Minute Commute last year. I’ve never seen anything else affect cohesion within a distributed team like IRC can. When your whole team is in one chat room, you feel free to ask questions any time. Unlike instant messaging, you don’t even need to know whom to ask. When all conversations happen in one room, interested parties are free to observe or participate. Reflecting on our team’s experience with IRC over the past four years, we could only come to one conclusion: everyone should be using it.
Unfortunately, we could easily point to reasons why more businesses weren’t using IRC. Lots of teams don’t have an extra server computer lying around on which to install an IRC server. The IT department would need to administer the server and the IRC client software on every workstation. IRC is operated via a bunch of arcane text commands that represent a steep learning curve. After some brainstorming, we decided to create an IRC-like service that would alleviate these problems — a group chat service built with businesses in mind. Enter ShopTalk. We’ve been working on it and using it for months now and we’d like to enlist the readers of The One Minute Commute to participate in our beta. First, let me tell you a little about ShopTalk.
Zero Setup
You don’t have to install or administer anything. It all runs on our servers. Simply create an account and start chatting.
Multiple Rooms
You probably work primarily on one team, but you’re peripherally involved with several, right? ShopTalk allows you to be in multiple chat rooms at once. Your team’s room is the active tab:
If someone on another team so much as mentions your name, that tab will instantly light up, and you can switch to it with one click:
Infinite Archive
Hallway conversations are great, but they can easily be forgotten. ShopTalk archives all your chatting forever, so you can refer back to it. Since the archives are securely stored on our servers, you won’t lose conversations that took place while your computer wasn’t connected — you can easily log in and scroll up to catch up on what you missed.
Sneak Peek
We’re not quite ready to release ShopTalk to the world yet, but we will be soon! For now, I’ve created a demo code for 100 interested readers of The One Minute Commute: ONEMINUTE. You can redeem that demo code here. Try it out and let me know what you think. We look forward to your feedback.