Zulip – Open-source, threading-based Slack alternative

Re:Zulip – Open-source, threading-based Slack alternative by fny on Friday July 27, 2018 @01:16AM (#17623610)

So would it be correct to summarize zulip as real-time email?

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Re:Zulip – Open-source, threading-based Slack alternative by krispbyte on Friday July 27, 2018 @02:42AM (#17623940)

Google Wave was the real-time email, remember that? me neither.

I wonder what would have happened if they used the tech to build a chat application instead of an email-killer.

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Re:Zulip – Open-source, threading-based Slack alternative by fosco on Friday July 27, 2018 @10:15AM (#17626103)

I loved google wave -- it was great and ahead of its time. I think it was a major mistake that google let it go and that the apache wave foundation never got it going. it is too late now but really a greatly missed opportunity.

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Re:Zulip – Open-source, threading-based Slack alternative by infinite8s on Friday July 27, 2018 @11:00AM (#17626424)

It was definitely ahead of its time. It would be interesting to do a reboot with much better chatbot technology (driven by all the advances in NLP).

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Re:Zulip – Open-source, threading-based Slack alternative by nine_k on Friday July 27, 2018 @11:15AM (#17626555)

(1) It wasn't.

(2) It tried to be an all-in-one comm platform, and because of that it excelled in none of what it tried to do.

(3) Poor UI performance was the death sentence of it. If you can't use it fluently, it's not good for real-time. Poor UI design did not help, on top of that.

It was an interesting experiment, but not all experiments end up with a successful product. I hope the ideas will be unearthed at some moment and reused with a greater effect.

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Re:Zulip – Open-source, threading-based Slack alternative by dboreham on Friday July 27, 2018 @10:08AM (#17626046)

They used the tech to build Google Docs.

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Re:Zulip – Open-source, threading-based Slack alternative by BerislavLopac on Friday July 27, 2018 @04:15AM (#17624360)

Real-time email is a contradiction in terms, as (at least for me) being asynchronous is one of the main defining features of email. Essentially any chat app, from IRC to Slack, can be called "real-time" email. To me, the phrase "real-time email" sounds like calling a submarine an "underwater car".

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Re:Zulip – Open-source, threading-based Slack alternative by nine_k on Friday July 27, 2018 @11:12AM (#17626528)

IMs hit the sweet spot between fully real-time (like the phone) and fully async (like paper mail).

The UI is built for efficient real-time communication, but the underlying data model (the log, notifications, statuses, etc) allows for very easy async communication.

I think someone could make a great product by just adding IM-like UI features on top of an existing email backend. Email is pretty fast these days to work as mostly-instant communication.

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Re:Zulip – Open-source, threading-based Slack alternative by taohansen on Sunday July 29, 2018 @01:29AM (#17636668)

I agree! Check out https://delta.chat. I use it every day for emailing. Subject lines are the ellipsized first words of your body and every message is a new email.

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Re:Zulip – Open-source, threading-based Slack alternative by jremmons on Friday July 27, 2018 @01:25AM (#17623651)

Zulip is closer to being "real-time email" than Slack is, but I wouldn't call it real-time email.

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