I never quite got Convore. Grove is sort of interesting, but I doubt it'll displace us from HipChat.
The major advantage of using a non-proprietary protocol like IRC is that people can choose their own clients... but the state of most IRC clients nowadays is abysmal. Colloquy on OS X, for example, hasn't been updated in years.
If I was going to use IRC to communicate with my team, I'd just create a private channel on Freenode. We'd miss out on archiving, but I don't think that that feature alone is worth $2/user/month.
Freenode is for free software. It's not "free as in someone else runs our private chat for us." Hosting business chat via terms of service abuse is inadvisable to say the least.
At no cost you could connect to the channel with IRCII (or pick any other logging bot/client), activate logging and write a shell script to pull the logs into a website at midnight every day.
Colloquy can be pretty bad, but I've been satisfied using either Adium's IRC support (though I wish I could easily block the server message / nickserv spam) or LimeChat, which was the simplest/fastest standalone OSX IRC client at the time I was using a standalone client.
With Adium I've been pretty happy since I discovered the ability to turn off show/join messages on the history menu.
The other thing was the Renkoo message style (from preferences, messages) was much better than what I had before. Date and name to the sides, content in the middle.
I have a Mac mini logged in permanently so I can review logs and there I took the advice which was to right click and block chanserv and nickserv. Not quite brave enough to do that on my laptop.
Convore was a pretty big hit at PyCon 2011. It was useful because it allowed people to create different rooms for each event going on at the conference. It worked really, really well.
Too bad it wasn't a product that could be sold. The technology and site were cool and worked well.
I really enjoyed Convore on PyCon last year. Much more than Twitter for example. I remember there were rooms on just about anything, and among other things I met some guys to grab beers with on Convore. Too bad it didn't work out.
The code would need a little bit of cleaning up before it could be released, but this sounds like a good idea to me. I left the company quite a while ago, so my say no longer counts, but I would be supportive if Leah and Jori decided to go down this route.
The major advantage of using a non-proprietary protocol like IRC is that people can choose their own clients... but the state of most IRC clients nowadays is abysmal. Colloquy on OS X, for example, hasn't been updated in years.
If I was going to use IRC to communicate with my team, I'd just create a private channel on Freenode. We'd miss out on archiving, but I don't think that that feature alone is worth $2/user/month.