Or use Discourse which offers many of the same benefits without the "rush to see who can post the most upvoted image and win" dynamic, and potential for more substantive discussions!<p>Bonus, you don't have to write any extra code either. Well unless you want to contribute ...<p><a href="http://github.com/discourse/discourse" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/discourse/discourse</a>
Hey, I wrote this, so I can answer a few of the questions.<p>Why not discourse/reddit/telescope/etc...? I looked into those. Solving the problem we needed a few basic things, posts, threaded comments, and votes. The killer feature that we wanted it to be private to our company, and we wanted authentication integrated with <a href="http://teamtreehouse.com" rel="nofollow">http://teamtreehouse.com</a>. Hacking any existing solutions to fit that auth model seemed more work than it was worth.<p>When it comes down to it, it's a ridiculously simple app. There's a few models, and not a whole lot of code. When we gauged the effort of integrating most of the OS solutions into our oauth system and locking it down to be in-company only, just making the app was way easier. Plus. we can easily extend it to fit our needs, and we have. Also, I wanted to play w/ rails 4 + ruby 2 for the first time.<p>Regarding the name, it was a code name. The tool is built for having conversations (convos), and I though convoy was a cool codename. As soon as Ryan saw my working prototype, he told me to launch it, and the name stuck. I didn't even know there was a movie.
To sum up a work day.<p>Standup, planning meetings, discussions, speeches, emails, phone, IM, wikis, surveys, internal blogs, and now Reddit.<p>When am I supposed to do actual work?
We use dashboard.io internally at 500startups - <a href="https://dashboard.io/" rel="nofollow">https://dashboard.io/</a> (Paul Singh's latest startup), and it's quite effective. It has multiple inner networks on the same network (like founders, mentors and staff inside the bigger 500startups network), discussions, events and private messaging. Highly recommended
Until they hopefully outsource it: Reddit in 10 lines of code. <a href="http://www.drurly.com/blog/2012/06/26/reddit-in-10-lines-of-code/" rel="nofollow">http://www.drurly.com/blog/2012/06/26/reddit-in-10-lines-of-...</a>
I do think there is a place, in a distributed company or working with offshore resources, for "idle chit-chat".<p>Although it may seem like a waste of time, this is how people bond. Even if you're dealing with different cultures, people still have birthdays, weekend plans, weddings/children etc. These are common and help bring people thousands of miles apart together.
I probably would have given telescope a chance but this might have a different feature set. <a href="http://telesc.pe/" rel="nofollow">http://telesc.pe/</a>
A lot of people here overlook that Jim clearly must have had fun building Convoy. Working at 37Signals means that he couldn't have taken too long to build this rather simple (yet beautiful) web app.