Hey Product Hunt!
We're going to give Product Hunt community members early access to Chatmunk.
I've written a medium post that defines the problems we're addressing and explains why we've built the product. It's here: https://medium.com/@erictwillis/...
Whatever question you may have, I've likely rambled long enough there to have covered it.
Our team has always loved communities and community-based products. We want to bring the "community feel" to twitter by creating topic-based communities you can easily jump in and out of without sorting through the unfiltered feed. If you want to discuss the Warrior’s game, jump into the Golden State Warriors’ channel and discuss the team with other fans. There is no need to curate a list on Twitter or follow hashtags. You don’t have to scan your feed continuously to find something that engages you. The feed in the Warriors’ channel will be a real-time discussion about amazing plays, controversial calls, the latest 3 from one of the Splash Brothers, or latest Riley Curry vine. If you want to discuss products, you could join the Product Hunt channel. Or subscribe to game 1 of the NBA Finals to discuss it live with other fans. You’ll easily find the content you want and others who are passionate about the topic.
Here are highlights of some of Chatmunk's features
-Quickly create topic-based communities
-Create subchannels for topics that are important for your community
-Create events to that your members can subscribe to and be notified of when they go live
-Go Private or approval-only for more intimate communities
We're currently testing Chatmunk with some early users and would love to invite you in. We'll all jump into the Product Hunt channel :)
@erictwillis nice job dude.
Been on Chatmunk since the early days and I like the premise.
As has been said previously it's hard to scale communities when a lot of people are involved...Keen to see how it goes. We both know the challenges of 'managing' an active community
Something that would be cool is having a Nuzzel-esque way to find out what is being talked about from who you follow, friends of friends, etc etc. So where Nuzzel has the news of certain topic areas like "Tech" - you can have those conversations grouped too.
Do you think this is something to dig away at Moments on Twitter? - I see how it could step on its toes and is also completely separate.
Seeing the recent launch of collaborative platforms like Anchor, have you seen anything that could be helpful with Chatmunk?
Excited to see where this goes & will continue to play around with it!
@bentossell Yes, Ben. We know the struggles and I imagine this will be incredibly challenging!
I don't think this targets Moments as it's currently constructed. Moments is more of a news product that delivers bite-sized updates as events are happening. There could be some overlapped depending on the type of content that is shared, though.
Anchor has the best onboarding process I've seen in a while. So that would make anyone rethink their onboarding process to see if there is a way it could be improved. Beyond the onboarding, you can tell that a lot of thought was put into every interaction. It's just an amazingly well-designed product. I wouldn't be shocked if it's the breakout app of 2016.
@erictwillis I think looking at how Anchor handles feeds of conversations within 'topics' will be interesting for Chatmunk.
Could be interesting to link them!
@bentossell Yes! I was thinking of some interesting ways to incorporate video/audio into the experience (jotting down some ideas for the future) and as soon as I saw Anchor thought it would be cool to have an API to do a deep integration.
@erictwillis Eric this is awesome! I've been thinking about a similar idea to this (see my digest idea here - http://bit.ly/1KnQFXQ) in terms of how to answer the question, "How can we help people find more of the conversations on Twitter they would be interested in?" in the same way @Abrams has done for news. So I'm very curious to see how Chatmunk can help bridge that gap with the channels/topics/chatmunk rooms sorted out. One feature that might be interesting is being alerted when a specific user or influencer you follow tweets about a channel you follow, for instance I might want to know when the local journalist tweets about the Warriors, but not when they tweet about the 49ers or Giants. Anyway excited to jump on and engage, congrats on the launch!
Like @jack said few days ago, Twitter is Live. It doesn't have a common social network definition. My question is: How can you have a real discussion when a community have a thousand subscribers?
@tsunaze Hello Pierre-Marie. Thanks for the question. Communities can have sub-channels much in the same way you can on Slack. So ideally, someone would use the channel within a community that has the type of atmosphere they're looking for at that moment. If you want to be in the channel with 500 fans discussing the NBA Finals or in sub-channel with 20 fans, you'll have your choice. We'll certainly be working on this and I've learned a lot of about the dynamics of real-time discussion by managing a few Slack communities and also interviewing people about the types of discussions they would like.
Hey guys!
I write the iOS code for Chatmunk - and I am looking forward to getting you all into the app.
Because I'm not too popular on Twitter (110 Followers wooooo!) I've always had trouble finding conversations and interacting with likeminded people.
However, I've really enjoyed using Makerhunt, which is a Slack Community for... makers. It's been really valuable for me to chat in real time with people who share my interests.
However, Slack isn't exactly a perfect solution - it's designed for use by enterprise teams and has quite a few quirks because of that (for example, entry into a slack group has a ton of friction.)
Combining the best aspects of Slack and Twitter will prove to be incredibly valuable - I'm excited to see where this goes.
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