At 12:50 AM PDT on April 21st, our database instance hosted at Amazon EC2 started experiencing IO-wait hiccups. This lead the MySQL to queue up queries and finally to get jammed, something which also caused our web-site and jabber-rooms to fail at 12:53 AM PDT.

Read the rest of this post »

Finally Google Apps Marketplace got a good group chat.

Jaconda creates persistent rooms for discussions which can be added as Google Talk™ buddies. It stores chats and files for later access, helps to eliminate duplicate conversations and speed up team communication.

Using Google Apps™ integration your Google Apps account will sign you in to Jaconda as well. No need to re-login, get to your Team Chat right from Gmail™ or other Google™ services.

How to Add Jaconda to your Google Apps?

Just click the button below and Jaconda will be added to your Google Apps (you need admin privileges to do that).

You just need to specify your Google Apps domain and new Jaconda account for that domain will be automatically created for you.

How does login work?

When you log into Jaconda first time your account is automatically created. It will have the same Email, Google Talk and Name as in Google Apps. Jaconda won't store your password, it will authorize you using Google Open ID protocol.

Keep in mind that Jaconda accounts created from Google Apps are subscribed to the trial Medium plan which has 30 members limit. You will have 30-days free trial and might want to upgrade or downgrade to the plan which best fits your company size.

I do have a Jaconda account already, how can I migrate it to Google Apps?

At the moment we offer Google Apps integration only for new clients. If you want to get your current account integrated with Google Apps please fill a support ticket and we will help you with that.

We got lots of feedback lately and implemented a few features that been asked for.

Now you can turn on and off notification sounds in web-chat. The setting is stored per-room per-user, so you can mute the general chat room but leave sound on in a room with notifications from bug-tracker:

Another cool feature is drag-n-drop upload. Of course only modern browsers are supported. The cool part is drag'n'drop works on all room sub-pages:

We are looking forward for your feedback. Add stuff that you think is missing and vote for the features at Jaconda Feedback Forum.

Today we're happy to open up the shiny new Jaconda API version 2 (docs).

The Jaconda API was opened exactly one year ago (February 27, 2010) and it is heavily outdated now. Jaconda didn’t have the concepts of Members, Guests and Uploads a year ago. It was just a small Jabber Conference service, where a user could specify allowed jabber ids to chat and tweak some room settings. Last year we introduced a great amount of changes and it is easier to release a new version of the API instead of updating the old one and maintaining it's backwards-compatibility.

The new API allows you to manage Rooms, Members, Uploads and Messages. It exposes pretty much every feature of our web-client and can be used by all members of your account. Members can authenticate with their own API token (the preferred way of auth) or with email and password. Basically the new API can be used to build 3d-party tools on top of Jaconda, for example native desktop clients.

We still don’t have the streaming API, but it is on our list. Vote for it to speed up the development process on our Feedback forum.

We've also decided to separate the notifications functionality from the API. Each room now has it's own Room token, which can be used only for posting notifications. No read access at all. This is important because you probably don't want to allow 3d-party services to have access to your transcripts.

You can also distinguish the notifications from your project management and ticket services by providing the sender_name parameter.

We encourage you all to upgrade your integrations and notifications to use the new API and obtain better security. We will shutdown the old Jaconda API on June, 1st.

Over the last few months we've been growing rapidly. Much of that growth is thanks to our customers telling their friends and colleagues about Jaconda. We are very happy to see our users like you spreading the word, which is why we want to thank you.

To show our gratitude we are introducing our new referral program, that allows you to earn free months and to increase room and member count. Send your referral link which you can find on your Account page to your friends and colleagues, share it on your website, Twitter or Facebook, spread the word!

Read the rest of this post »

While some services decided to remove the Open ID login option, we think that Open ID can save people some time being implemented the right way. That's why we've added a Sign in with Google Account button under the usual username/password form.

We've just rolled out a new integration. Now you can integrate your Jaconda chat room with Lighthouse issue tracker. It will broadcast a notification when someone creates or updates a ticket, posts a message, etc. This is actually quite cool because you can get new tickets as they appear and discuss them with your team at the same time.

Hope you will find this useful. Check out Lighthouse integration help page for more details.

Think we missed the service you use? Just let us know!

Best chiefs should learn from best chefs

Read the rest of this post »