Everyday, at WhereCloud, our team connects virtually using Campfire from 37Signals. Campfire is a collaborative chat system that allows a group of users to share text messages, in addition to pictures and tweets, via a web interface.
In retrospect, it’s interesting that we use a chatting system when everyone’s desk is no farther than a couple of metres apart. But it also makes sense because we don’t want to disrupt the work flow of the group when asking questions or sharing information. Everyone can monitor Campfire messages at their own pace.
Over time, it has become a message repository but also a fun place to hangout. Exchanging animated gifs, funny tweets and pictures.
After visiting Edward Ocampo-Gooding (@edwardog) and the team at Shopify (@shopify), I noticed that everyone was receiving tweets related to Shopify within their Campfire room. I found that to be a really cool idea. So we decided to install that same capability using the Twitter2Campfire project.
A special “TheBorg” user was created and we assigned him a “BlaBlaBla” room. Within that room, TheBorg executes a query every minute to grab all tweets containing keywords of interest (tweets from the team, @wherecloud mentions, mobile events and industry news, etc). After a couple of months, that dedicated room now serves as a repository of everything Twitter we care about.
Then we decided to spice things up in the regular “Lounge” room.
I read that GitHub (a company/service we use to host our project’s source code) had created a special software robot that would answer various commands and post answers within a CampFire room: Hubot.
Hubot’s results are always interesting and sometimes quite funny. We rely on its higher intelligence to guide us when taking business-related decisions.
For example:
Question: TheBorg 8ball Should we send that Press Release today ? Answer: No doubt about it.
We can also ask him to send us a random Google image matching a specific term, give us directions to a new client office, perform language translation and, for a big laugh, give us a random “People of Walmart” picture.
Combining the Twitter extraction and publication ability along with Hubot question answering intelligence has turned our Campfire usage into a more interesting place to share stuff.
L8er – Martin
P.S: We are always interested in finding cool Hubot scripts, so if you have one, feel free to share it with us.
Attribution: The room’s screenshots were taken from the excellent native OSX Campfire application Flint.