This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Visit the Product Blog for more information on our products.

Thanks Jason,

We hope that people will be able to have some fun with Kumbaya. Our team should be adding a few new features in the weeks to come, so keep a look out.

What is the point or use?

Odd feature to be touted by the ‘less is more’ church.

‘tis neat, though.

eventually the s vs n blog has become yet another company blog, serving mostly self promotion and self glorification. too bad…

Guys,

Right now, the point is to have some fun with RubyOSA, Marshmallow, Campfire, and iTunes—and to see what can be done by combining them. :) Let’s not get to serious here…

We are adding features as I write this to make the bot more useful. Keep an eye out and we will post when we are making the next release. Happy camping!

Mark,

my comment was a general observation, after reading countless company headlines in your feed. It was not really targeting your article. I understand that a company should use its blog for selfpromotion etc, but for me its more noise than signal.

Anonymous Jay,

Well, if you are referring to 37signals, it is not my company. I am with forty two squared, who developed Kumbaya. We are all about shameless self-promotion… but thanks. Hope you can find the bot useful in some way, even as a diversion.

So isn’t porting the most annoying “plugin-in”/script concept from the world of IRC kind of like admitting that Campfire is IRC with a little dab of Web 2.0 painted on?

Robb,

It really amazes me how many people logged into our Campfire today to say how happy they were about this little bot. I do believe that it amazes me even more how everyone that commented on this post is negative about something that is supposed to be fun. Yeah, it is annoying and by the end of today I was tired of it. It does show though, that we can build useful apps onto things like Campfire and my team at 42squared is doing just that. Kumbaya was simply a way to play with RubyOSA and tie it into some of the other stuff we are doing. Have a great day, don’t be so serious people

John Hornbeck http://42squared.com

42squared can get really pissy, can’t they?

Noise.

Darrell,

We are actually a very cheery bunch :-)

What options do you have for Windows users?

Mike:

I am looking into a Windows alternative.

We are currently swamped with a project-in-progress, but we have been adding features to Kumbaya incrementally. Expect a new release after November 7th (our major deadline for the current project).

For what its worth we enjoy hearing what others have done to make life easier/more fun for 37 signal’s subscribers. We learned about Pyro this way and it was a huge boon.

BTW : i appended onto this exchange while combing s-vs-n archives for someone counter-proof to my IT team’s (paranoia) that Campfire’s (yes, the paid account feature set) “Files & Transcripts” management page’s lack of better Admin-level file download/deletion features is actually an evil design decision to force upgrade-by-exasperation.

Since old s-vs-n comments sections are not “live” like forum threads, how to have this conversation with programming/support staff there?

Thanks. -dm