The Y-Combinator-backed startup Convore launches today, boasting one of the easiest ways to handle group-chat.
Convore is a real-time communication tool, but unlike many other apps that offer group chat, Convore runs in your browser and doesn’t require a download or chat client. “Basically, it’s a contemporary version of IRC,” says co-founder Leah Culver.
There is no shortage of companies who have tried to tackle group messaging – big names like Yahoo, Facebook, Google, Skype. But what Convore has built is clean and simple, fast and free.
Convore supports both public and private groups. Currently, based on the activities of the alpha-testers, the topics of the public groups veer towards tech, movies, and “who’s up late at night coding,” but users are able to create their own.
Within each topic are a number of threads, and within these are conversations, updated in real-time. This makes Convore feel like a blend of forum and chat. When you log into the site, you can see the conversations that have occurred while you were offline, and – a great feature – when you step back in to chat, Convore scrolls to the point where you left off, so you can read to catch up.
Culver is joined by co-founders Eric Florenzano and Eric Maguire. The three have built the real-time technology upon which Convore runs. It uses what Florenzano describes as “long polling, which means that on every page, the browser opens a connection that talks back to some proprietary technology we’ve built to speak to a cluster of Redis servers. We have some technology that parses each message for links, for embedded images, and constructs some structured data about the message, and then sends it out to everyone in the group via Redis.”
You can sign up for Convore now and take it for a spin.
