Campfire (37signals)

» see campfirenow.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

campfire was a chat room you could put a team in. that was the whole product. you got a url and invited your coworkers. the room kept its scrollback indefinitely. you could paste code or drop images into the conversation. there was no channels abstraction because each room was its own channel. there was no threading because threading did not exist yet as a chat concept.

37signals shipped campfire in february 2006. at the time, team-chat-as-a-saas-product was not a category. the closest peers were enterprise im suites like jabber that companies ran on their own servers, plus aim and msn shared between coworkers who happened to be friendly. campfire was the first time you paid a small monthly fee to have a hosted chat room and expected the company on the other end to keep it running.

campfire's peak years overlap with my early career, but turkish workplaces in 2008-2012 ran on different rails. msn was still the default informal chat. teams used email plus phone for the work parts. the kind of small us web-startup that ran on rails and used basecamp and tweeted from the office did not really have a turkish equivalent at scale. i read 37signals's blog as a young engineer. i did not work in a campfire room.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

by 2010 campfire was a default piece of small-shop web-startup infrastructure. the appeal was that 37signals had written the chat room you wanted instead of the chat room your it department thought you needed. it loaded fast. it had a sane url scheme. you could open it in a browser tab and forget about it. when slack launched in 2013 it was effectively campfire with better notifications plus a wider funnel.

~ the next chapter ~

slack did not pretend it was something new. stewart butterfield said publicly that the team had been campfire customers at flickr and at glitch. slack's vocabulary of rooms and messages is campfire's vocabulary with a better icon set. by the time 37signals stopped accepting new signups in august 2014, slack was a year old and growing at rates that made the question of whether campfire would still exist functionally irrelevant. it would not. existing customers were grandfathered. nobody new could join.

then in 2024 37signals revived the name as a self-hosted product under their once line, with the message that you could buy chat software outright instead of renting it. it was the same idea as the original, with the lesson of the intervening decade baked in. the original hosted campfire is still gone. the brand came back as a deliberately different product.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »