Show HN: Gitter – Chat for GitHub

(Edit: I initially thought this was _from_ GitHub. Apparently it&#x27;s not, so please disregard the nagging below. It is a cool idea, but if GitHub did this, I&#x27;d have different expectations.)<p>I&#x27;d be all over this if it was an IRC server. Most big projects already have an IRC channel on FreeNode, so this&#x27;d be a natural fit: Provide an IRC server with a channel for each project, provide a free web client for this server with the GitHub-goodies.<p>But alas, apparently it&#x27;s just another proprietary chat network.

Error:<p>failed to fetch user profile (status: 403 data: {&quot;message&quot;:&quot;Maximum number of login attempts exceeded&quot;,&quot;documentation_url&quot;:&quot;<a href="http://developer.github.com/v3&quot;}" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.github.com&#x2F;v3&quot;}</a>) at Strategy.userProfile (&#x2F;opt&#x2F;gitter&#x2F;landing-app&#x2F;node_modules&#x2F;passport-github&#x2F;lib&#x2F;passport-github&#x2F;strategy.js:90:28) at passBackControl (&#x2F;opt&#x2F;gitter&#x2F;landing-app&#x2F;node_modules&#x2F;passport-github&#x2F;node_modules&#x2F;passport-oauth&#x2F;node_modules&#x2F;oauth&#x2F;lib&#x2F;oauth2.js:105:9) at IncomingMessage.exports.OAuth2._executeRequest.request.on.callbackCalled (&#x2F;opt&#x2F;gitter&#x2F;landing-app&#x2F;node_modules&#x2F;passport-github&#x2F;node_modules&#x2F;passport-oauth&#x2F;node_modules&#x2F;oauth&#x2F;lib&#x2F;oauth2.js:124:7) at IncomingMessage.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:126:20) at IncomingMessage._emitEnd (http.js:366:10) at HTTPParser.parserOnMessageComplete [as onMessageComplete] (http.js:149:23) at CleartextStream.socketOnData [as ondata] (http.js:1472:20) at CleartextStream.CryptoStream._push (tls.js:544:27) at SecurePair.cycle (tls.js:898:20) at EncryptedStream.CryptoStream.write (tls.js:285:13) at Socket.ondata (stream.js:38:26)<p>Guess it&#x27;s built with node ;)<p>After pressing the button again, it gave me the confirmation message.

You guys should offer this for github enterprise. Any form of integration would also be nice (an IRC or XMPP bridge) because I don&#x27;t want yet another chat client on my desktop, and alerts from web clients don&#x27;t cut it...<p>...slightly offtopic, on the alerts: chrome&#x27;s rich notifications pop under apple&#x27;s desktop notifications, and neither let me capture the notification and have the system voice <i>read</i> it to me rather than flash up in a corner that I&#x27;m not looking at. But campfire&#x27;s in-browser notifications are the worst of all, some random tab beeping when I have 100 open.

Looks pretty neat. I went to signup, but then noticed that they require commit access to my public repos. Why do you need this permission to integrate links to the code and similar features? I don&#x27;t like giving out commit access unless absolutely necessary.

I don&#x27;t really like the idea of signing up with my github account. But I like the idea of Gitter.<p>One small improvement: Link the &quot;@GitChat&quot; on the confirmation page to the twitter account ;)

The landing page looks really slick. I was wondering, how did you create the design for it? I&#x27;m a programmer and my web design skills are limited to installing bootstrap, and I&#x27;m always fascinated, how would you come up with right color&#x2F;font&#x2F;layout matching

Show HN: Something else that isn&#x27;t done yet, but wants access to my accounts for who knows what reason.

This looks like it was influenced by the Hub, a Node Knockout project with a landing page created by high school students that&#x27;s been picking up steam on Twitter since last weekend.<p><a href="http://nodeknockout.com/teams/team-name-goes-here" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nodeknockout.com&#x2F;teams&#x2F;team-name-goes-here</a><p>Both landing pages seem nice, and looks like a great way to test the idea out!

Very interesting, I&#x27;m looking forward to checking out the product! We use GitHub exclusively for everything; even our non-technical team-members leverage GitHub for sales, HR, marketing, blog post writing.. You name it. We did have to build a product to make this easier on ourselves [1], into which we&#x27;ve been resisting integrating chat. Chat is the only non-GitHub piece of our workflow, Gitter looks promising!<p>[1] <a href="http://zenhub.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;zenhub.io</a>

Signed up immediately. Very promising, especially if the history stays up there for anyone who joins the &quot;repo&quot; discussion later on.<p>This could be really important for bigger projects where new&#x2F;significant features should be discussed openly. This way the information stays attached to the repo and others can refer to it later on.<p>Looking forward to seeing it in action!

We&#x27;ve got a lot of the parts of this already built, just not packaged in this format.<p>We&#x27;re trying to see how much support there would be for a product like this. If we get a lot of &quot;signups&quot; we&#x27;ll get cracking immediately.<p>Comments&#x2F;feedback more than welcome.<p>Thanks in advance for your support.

One question:<p>After signing up for Gitter I checked out Trou.pe. But even without signing up for Trou.pe it already knew my gravatar &amp; was able to suggest me usernames (including my full name) when going to <a href="http://trou.pe" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;trou.pe</a>.<p>How&#x27;s that possible?

If you ever want to integrate real-time video chat as well, send us a note at vLine: <a href="https://vline.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vline.com</a>. We actually have what we call a &quot;GitHub identity provider&quot; (<a href="https://vline.com/developer/docs/getting_started" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vline.com&#x2F;developer&#x2F;docs&#x2F;getting_started</a>) that should make it really easy.<p>We used that to build GitTogether (<a href="https://gittogether.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gittogether.com</a>), which is a similar concept to this: text chat and video chat with people you follow plus members of your teams and organizations.

Hm, &quot;signing up&quot; by providing read-only OAuth access to my GitHub account is... fascinating. :-)<p>Very clever way to make signups easy, relevant to the interest you&#x27;re trying to gauge, and gather far more information about me than just my e-mail address (eg. my activity level on GitHub, the type of projects I&#x27;m involved in).

A lot of comments here are saying things like &quot;I wouldn&#x27;t be able to persuade my team&#x2F;non-technical colleagues to use this instead of HipChat&quot;. Surely one the most exciting uses for Gitter is discussion on open-source repos, where you aren&#x27;t already communicating with repo collaborators?

Just tried signing up with github and got the message -<p>&quot;Gitter isn&#x27;t ready yet. If we get enough support, we will launch this in a few months. Help spread the word by Tweeting about us and follow @GitChat for updates.&quot;<p>From the other comments here, it looks like people are able to try out a demo or something. What am I missing?

From the screenshot with localhost on location bar I thought it would be self hosted.<p>EDIT: The screenshot was updated. ;D

Not directly related to your product, but I always wonder why, with soft launches like this where you gauge interest, why not make the &quot;interest&quot; count public? How many people have you captured?<p>That being said, I&#x27;ve wanted this idea for a while, so I signed up straight away.

My Hackathon GitChat project from one year ago: <a href="http://chat.gitrun.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;chat.gitrun.com&#x2F;</a>. Source: <a href="https://github.com/gitrun/chat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;gitrun&#x2F;chat</a>

I want to pay money for this. A chat service with built-in GitHub integration including issue and file referencing sounds like a fantastic tool for teams building using GitHub.<p>Any chance you can use an actual Kickstarter instead so I can throw money at you? :)

A wonderful chat service called Kato offers a very similar chat &lt;=&gt; github integration<p><a href="http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kato.quora.com&#x2F;Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos</a>

Another immediate signup. Would like to echo @davman&#x27;s comment about showing the interest count. It would be interesting to watch the needle, so to speak. A +1 for Hubot integration as well.<p>At any rate, best of luck! Amazing effort.

Beautiful, but unfortunately it wouldn&#x27;t be appropriate for my non-technical teammates, so I cannot see it beating out hipchat.<p>I love the concept though and I can see this being the tool of choice for technical teams.

We&#x27;ve already built this at Kato <a href="http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kato.quora.com&#x2F;Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos</a>

Great work! Could you share about what stack&#x2F;technologies used to build it? Trying to learn how to choose the best platform for each solution.

How long will it take to be a usable product? I might be interested and need to know if I should keep looking around or just wait a bit.

Looks great, just needs some emojis and hubot integration and I&#x27;m sold!

A perfect headline &#x2F; product for HN. Very nicely done Rick Rolling.

The &#x27;support&#x27; button for trou.pe doesn&#x27;t work. :(

Nice one! This is a great repurposing of your existing product.

&quot;Available everywhere that has internets&quot;<p>And my Windows Phone? :(

Looks really interesting, you guys should take a look at www.surfly.com. With Surfly in the mix you would not just be able to chat about things but also show people around.<p>Also, I couldn&#x27;t find any contact info. :(

I love the source code at the beginning of this page.

I initially read this as &quot;GitHub for cats&quot;

Is it open-sourced?

it will be great to use this -- when it comes out in a few months.<p>i guess they aren&#x27;t waiting until its closer to production

Great great app :-) Impressive!

Will it be open source?

Chat apps come and go... and there I am on IRC. I hang out with lots of people on github there.<p>Why would I use this over IRC with the client of my choice? Build an IRC client that integrates with GitHub, or extensions for Adium to handle github URL&#x27;s. Or maybe GitHub could offer authorization through XMPP.<p>Why should I have to use a separate client when I already have Facebook, IRC, XMPP, etc. all managed from the same place?