Hmmm … Where Have I Seen Huddle Chat Before?
Boy, Huddle Chat, currently the “Featured Application” on Google’s (GOOG) new App Engine page, sure looks familiar. Where have I seen it before? Thinking… thinking… Oh, I know! Campfire!
“The layout is the same, the tabs at the top of the screen are the same, the right-side sidebar listing participants and file uploads is the same,” writes Daring Fireball’s John Gruber. “It even copies Campfire’s trick of formatting a message as ‘code’ if it contains literal newline characters.”
UPDATE: Google has taken Huddle Chat offline. Google Product Manager Pete Koomen offered the following explanation for the move:
As one of the App Engine product managers, I wanted to give an update — we’ve now taken HuddleChat down from the App Engine app gallery. The App Engine team was looking for some sample apps to help kick the tires on their new system, so we invited Googlers to build some as side projects. A couple of our colleagues here built HuddleChat in their spare time because they wanted to share work within their team more easily and thought persistent Web chat would do the trick. We’ve heard some complaints from the developer community, though, so rather than divert attention from Google App Engine itself, we thought it better to just take HuddleChat down.
