Chat is more of a generic term. The discussions we refer to are content based (right now centered around one hashtag or a Tweet). We will have other contents soon (hint: original content).
In my opinion you could have chosen a far better moment to launch, and a far better launch than the current. Don't expect your potential users to start digging for info for themselves (launch content) on a product they don't know and which on first sight is only irc (launch timing: better launched a bit later when you had a killer feature).
To me it is like you are introducing the iphone1 with the same famous talk by jobs, but stopping just before the it is one device killer punch line. Instead you are promisingbthat the 3 devices will become one in the future, with a lot less credit than Apple had at the time.
Lets end with saying good luck. I hope to see a subsequent announcement one day which reaches the FP, telling us you made it :).
This looks exactly like Shout[1]. This seems to be an IRC channel, and you have a web interface (using Shout) hosted on your domain, with some of Shout's features removed so that people can't use it to connect to other IRC servers. And you aren't giving any credit to Shout.
*EDIT: My apologies, I totally jumped the gun there. I didn't see the "?" at the bottom, which states that that's exactly what this is. I still think that you could give a little more credit to them, though. In my opinion, this is more than just "based" on Shout, as your credits say.
As I chat with one of the founders, If I had to describe the service I would write something like:
"kwak.io: a discussion-based (channels), real-time (chat) platform (server)"
which forme it sounds like: server + chat + channels === 'IRC'
Nowdays we have plenty of modern alternatives to good-old IRC: Slack, Gitter, Hipchat. So I asked where does kwak.io fits in?
For me it's a fun but unclear experiment. According to their manifesto (https://medium.com/@kwak.io/kwak-s-manifesto-14c69104e70) I get the "IRC communication style" part, but I'm not totally clear how will they achieve the "mixed with modern social features" part.
Good idea to go MVP and get it out in the world and get some learning going. Of course the down side to MVCs is the user doesn't know it's MVC — some comments might reflect that ;)
Looking forward to seeing where you take this IRC-esq revival!
Uh no not really. It means quack or "to slam down", or something. But that's not the common meaning.
Are you flemish? Don't know whether it might have extra meanings there.
Very nice. The UI feels slightly slower (more sluggish) than web IRC chats. The ability to enable audio on messages or @mentions (in settings) is a good addition. But how does kwak want/expect people to use this? www.kwak.io just has 4 hashtags and jumps me straight into a chatroom. Either I am missing something or there's nothing more to this "Show HN" than literally showing it?
We haven't dig too much into optimization yet, it's _almost_ vanilla Meteor with MongoDB.
The hashtags are created by the users, and they automatically rank based on activity, we will have many more interesting ranking algorithms to come.
So... it's chat?