[OhHeyItsE]

I'm with you. Maybe I'm too old to 'get it'. The progression of chat tools I've used for work collaboration: AIM -> Jabber -> HipChat -> Slack. HipChat & Slack have some convenient features like emailing you if someone @'s you while you are away. Otherwise, I've used them all exactly he same way. I really don't get the hype.

[kimar]

I find the design and polish of Slack to be significantly superior to that of HipChat. Feature-wise though, I'm with you and couldn't pinpoint the differences.

[bshimmin]

HipChat is significantly cheaper and purports to offer video chat (didn't work for us the one time we tried it).

I too generally find Slack to be a more appealing user experience, though along with others I find the advantages over, say, Skype plus email to be fairly nugatory.

Because I work on a bunch of different teams for different organisations, I currently have open Slack, HipChat, Skype, and Apple's Messages, and I have to use Google Hangouts (which periodically completely kills Chrome for me) for a daily standup. I sort of miss those happy days when you could just use Adium for everything.

[broabprobe]

I still use Adium for most of my chat needs. Aim, Facebook, Gchat, IRC, Slack, etc. I'm agnostic to what service everyone else is using as long as I can login from Adium :)