Burnt Coals

16 February 2006

37signals have just launched Campfire , their latest online app – and this time they’re going after the realtime project communication space.

I’m a big 37singnals fan – I use Backpack daily, for all sorts of different things, but I’m not convinced by this latest addition to their product stable. The interface is very nice on the whole – it shares the clean look with their other products, and hence usability is high. My only slight quibble is the scroll bar – when you have a chat that is longer then your browser window, you get a scroll bar on the far left of the window (like you’d expect), but when you scroll it only moves the chat section – the rest of the page stays fixed. Very strange – I guess they decided a scroll bar on the chat section looked ugly, but it’s a big usability sacrifice if you ask me.

The feature set is nice – it does all the things you’d want, and nothing more (a common trait of 37signal’s apps), but I can’t ever see myself using it (unlike all of their other products). All of the functionality of Campfire can easily be replicated using IM software, and is completely entrenched in my workflow. 37signals must think the same thing, as the first thing on the Campfire page after the title blurb is a highlight link to a page of points on why it is better then IM. Most of the points have never been an issue to me (such as network incompatibility, file sharing unreliability (just send it again!)...) – in fact, the only feature you seem to get out of using Campfire is persistent logs that anybody can view (although Adium – my IM program of choice – does very nice logging) – which I really don’t think justifies the monthly fee.

It’s a shame really – the implementation is very nice, but I can’t help thinking there development resources could have been better spent elsewhere.

From: Articles

16 February 2006