It appears that we're starting to use "Campfire" at work. That's a

It appears that we're starting to use "Campfire" at work. That's a
"persistent group chat" hosted in the United States. It has rooms like
IRC. Everything you write stays and will be readable by other people
who join *later*. You'll never miss anything which is pretty handy.
Downside is that we can't host it on our own -- and its huge lag.

It doesn't have one single usable Linux client, though. As I use Arch
Linux at work, too, I'm stumped. Most of my colleagues use a Mac and
they're happy with their GUI clients. So, I had no choice but to write
my own client.

It's called "ttyfire" and it's available at GitHub[1]. It's still
highly experimental, though. Plus, it integrates very well with *my*
desktop setup. ttyfire works something like ii[2], meaning you control
it using a named pipe. It comes with scripts that use tmux[3] as a
front end. It's the first time I tried that (tmux as a front end) and
it works reasonably well.

____________________

We also host our own instance of StatusNet[4] at work, the software
behind identi.ca. Sadly, I haven't found a good Linux client for
that, either, (and I'm sick using the web interface). Yes, there are
some clients and even a client written by the people at floodgap. All
clients, though, try to be "multi protocol" clients. They try to
support Twitter, identi.ca and generic StatusNet. Plus, they have an
awful user interface.

Guess what, I wrote my own client: sn2mail[5].

As the name implies, it's no interactive client. Instead, it polls
StatusNet (via cron) and sends an e-mail for each new message. A
second script can be used to post messages.

Together with the usual mail tools (Mutt, Exim, procmail), this is a
pretty comfortable setup. All StatusNet messages end up in a mail box.
Mutt allows for proper threading. I can write messages in Vim.

I really like converting stuff to e-mail. I do this for RSS feeds,
too. E-mail is a nice thing, there's nice tools to work with it, it's
fast and it's asynchronous. The most important thing, though, is that
e-mail is generic channel for communication. You can use it for
everything text-related.

____________________

1. https://github.com/vain/ttyfire

2. http://tools.suckless.org/ii/

3. http://tmux.sf.net

4. http://status.net

5. https://github.com/vain/sn2mail