Note: This is an old post from Sococo's blog. Keeping it around for history.

If you’re the type of person that’s been looking to get Sococo more integrated into your team’s workflow, our next few releases should have some gems that will help you get moving in the right direction.

We’re planning on opening up our chat platform and expanding its capabilities dramatically to improve the look and feel, organization, and also allow you to push third party information directly into your virtual office. I’d like to talk a little bit about the vision for this project, and also solicit feedback from the community.

You should know that we’re targeting Hubot as our first integration. This means that we’ll be writing an adapter and hosting it on Github. This should allow you to have some of the more complex and far reaching integrations available to you right out of the gates, thanks to Hubot’s extensive community library. We like this approach, because it puts power in your hands immediately.

We’re trying to keep the API surface small and as simple as possible to start, with the intent that we can get something out there quickly and iterate fast with feedback from the community. One of the measures of simplicity is how complicated the Hubot adapter ends up being. After surveying the marketplace, we found Campfire’s adapter is a cool 239 lines of Coffeescript. They have a relatively small streaming API (discussed here) which provides a list of chats for a given room over time. We are currently internally debating a small endpoint for doing something very similar vs. providing a full on Bayeux endpoint with read/write and multiple data types (e.g. presence, profiles, chat messages, and so on).

Basically, it’s a tradeoff between providing something very simple to consume vs. providing something that has the full capabilities of Sococo’s own web client with built-in connection features. Regardless, we intend to provide everyone with a nice little javascript library for consuming it! I am very interested in hearing feedback on this point.

Our chat UI is going to get a much needed architectural and visual refresh. This will come in stages. For the first stage, we’ll push for simplifying managing multiple simultaneous conversations. We’re going with a tabbed approach, where all person-to-person conversations will be available from a single window (the Conversation window).

We’re also going to spruce up the chat log in both the person-to-person and room chat. In other words, we’ll be generally making it really nice to look at. Another technical point is that we’ll be using a WebView to support chat on Windows and Mac. Later on, rich media embeds will be much easier to support, and our intent is to also support a subset of html for sweet, sweet formatting options (for your integrations and more!).

Last but not least, we’re going to support preformatted text so that you can copy around say, a piece of code, and have it maintain whitespace and use a monospaced font. Simple, but oh so satisfying.

Hopefully this has been a useful preview of some upcoming functionality. I’m looking forward to hearing from you. Post your comment or suggestions below or find me directly on twitter at @joshuamoyers.