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 :)
@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.
@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.
Report
@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!
@patrickh@abrams Just read your Medium post and recommended it. We're actually working on a notification to work just like the one you've mentioned! Thanks for the feedback.
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.
I could imagine brands using this in a similar way that they use facebook pages. Did you guys consult with any brands / services when creating it? Generally think this could be really interesting though - I like the slack channels mention above. It also seems like a more active version of a list, something that I think is powerful but under used.
@shib88 Hello Shib. I did talk to brands. I also talked to athletes who thought it would be cool to set up channels for their team and put the game schedules as events in their channels to pull their fans in together. We have some awesome ideas on how we could make the experience really cool.
Report
This is so cool. The design is also amazing. One question though, can we create new communities based on topic or I can just select one from the list?
@risonsimon You can create communities of any kind. We have categories that you can select to organize the communities/channels, but you can create any type of channel you would like. I'm sure @sethlouey would be happy to know you like the design.
@jimiwen Less than 100 channels, but as we let more people in I'm sure that number will grow quickly as channels are user-generated.
Report
From a CTA and conversion perspective: Using a confirmation page from another service (Maitreapp) who appears in the 2/3 of the process confuse users... FIX IT ! :D
Startup TV
Startup TV
Startup TV
Startup TV
Meddler
Startup TV
Meddler
Startup TV
Chatmunk
unrd
Startup TV
Startup TV
Operation Pie
Pamily
Startup TV
Startup TV