We've been using Slack, which seems like maybe it's a cross between Team & chat. And I can't imagine life without it. So useful. I get close to zero emails from anyone I work with.

I can't recommend Slack more. It has an amazing web-app, works perfectly and the basic plan has no limit on users. I've tried both HipChat and Campfire, and I always felt that they were never the primary focus of the companies that own them.

It seems more like Chat than Team.

do you have a link to Slack? Doesn't seem to ring any bells https://github.com/search?q=slack

"Team" would seem to be mirroring what Automattic have done with WordPress + P2: http://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/

Team looks like a pretty awesome tool. Do you guys have any plans to release it publicly at some point?

We've been working on the high-level (not-email) communication with https://sendtoinc.com

Nope. We'd be open to, but there's not too much motivation to do so at the moment, to be honest. Just one of those things where most people are focused on other areas of the company right now.

Isn't team pretty much the same as SalesForce's Chatter? https://www.salesforce.com/chatter/

I was pretty excited when I first saw it on Dribbble and wanted to build an open source clone when I got time. I still need to get on that.

http://dribbble.com/shots/279956-What-s-up

I am currently building something very similar to this, I'd love to chat to get a feel of what people want. Send me an email hello@joshhornby.co.uk

What campfire client is that?

Alt text on the first image says it's a custom campfire client

Amazing summary and inspirational - thanks. Do you allow groups to create private chat rooms that are invite-only? Having that debate at the moment in our team.

Chat is completely open, anyone can join any room and anyone can see the full history of that room. This isn't just development, even Legal and HR have rooms. If you need to have something that exists as institutional knowledge Issues is a good way to go, but we try to hook Chat convos into Issues. Hubot is setup to post comments in an Issue when someone posts a link to an Issue in Chat. Great for looping that synchronous convo into the async stuff.

If you need to be more private, in person, email, or Bluejeans is the way to go.

Don't remember the link but one of their articles taught talked on chat vs email was the benefit o retaining organizational knowledge, staff can go and be staff come and you can still join the same chat group for a topic and get up to speed. I think then that their intention is to have most chats open and people can break out new groups when a bunch of discussion starts to be of topic, implying it needs a topic of its own.

Chat is definitely a great way to reduce meetings.

It's also good at backgrounding JIT conversations. If my mind is on something I can not have to think of an answer immediately. If the question is simple, it may not take much thought or distraction.

I wish Team would be released as a services or at a cost for self installation.

Team sounds a lot like what yammer was at one point.

Team looks to me the same as Yammer is now, and from Zack's post "high-level communication in the company" is exactly what Yammer is about (were just trying Yammer out ourselves, ad well as slack, which rocks!)

Wow. Running a company primarily on Chat and Team makes too much sense. I'm going to steal these ideas.