Hall Adds Activity Stream, Bets Real-time Is the Future
Hall, which just launched about one month ago, now sports a new look that is optimized for a wide screen, an activity bar to show you a live feed of Hall activity and two new real-time apps: to-do and notepad.
Hall lets people post discussion threads on topics including startups, ESPN, Apple and the NFL, and now provides more chat room-like communication for teams and communities with chat and hall activity split into two tabs. The activity bar also includes a list of halls and lets you set halls as "favorites" to access them quickly in the future.
In an email sent to Hall users, Hall CEO Brett Hellman wrote that the most requested features were to make the halls feel more like chat rooms, add an activity feed and offer more ways to be productive with apps.
"We're taking a bigger drive toward productivity," Brett says. "Eventually we'll let people build their own apps."
Both the to-do and notepad apps let you collaborate in real-time with other Hall members. Hall currently has numbers that are "well above average," but the company is not disclosing exact statistics on active users.
"We're all about real-time which no one else is really doing," Brett says. "Real-time is the future of the web."
While Google Docs and Evernote offer similar services, Brett says that these apps simplify the process.
"We love both those products," Brett says. "Hall is different. We give teams & communities one place where they can chat and collaborate. Other products like Google Docs require context switching... Meaning users have to go back and forth between Google Docs and Email. It's tiresome experience and we don't believe that's the future. We compete more with the Chatters, Yammers and business chat apps except unlike the other guys we're not duplicating the Facebook news feed for enterprise as that doesn't solve anything."
Instead of capitalizing on data, Brett says that the future is in synchronous verus asynchronous communications.
"All products will be real-time in a couple of years," Brett says. "At least the ones that survive."
Hall, founded by Ron Adams and Sanjay Kotagiri in 2011, has received $580K in seed funding from Founder Collective and Pivot North Capital.
SCREEN SHOTS
Hall activity feed.
To-do app lets you see when other hall members type, sort items and more.
The notepad app lets you create documents in real-time with other hall members.