It  appears  that  we're  starting to use "Campfire" at work. That's a
  "persistent group chat" hosted in the United States. It has rooms like
  IRC.  Everything  you write stays and will be readable by other people
  who join *later*. You'll never miss anything which  is  pretty  handy.
  Downside is that we can't host it on our own -- and its huge lag.

  It  doesn't have one single usable Linux client, though. As I use Arch
  Linux at work, too, I'm stumped. Most of my colleagues use a  Mac  and
  they're happy with their GUI clients. So, I had no choice but to write
  my own client.

  It's called "ttyfire" and it's available  at  GitHub[1].   It's  still
  highly  experimental,  though. Plus, it integrates very well with *my*
  desktop setup. ttyfire works something like ii[2], meaning you control
  it  using  a  named  pipe. It comes with scripts that use tmux[3] as a
  front end.  It's the first time I tried that (tmux as a front end) and
  it works reasonably well.


                           ____________________


  We  also  host  our own instance of StatusNet[4] at work, the software
  behind identi.ca.  Sadly, I haven't found  a  good  Linux  client  for
  that,  either,  (and I'm sick using the web interface). Yes, there are
  some clients and even a client written by the people at floodgap.  All
  clients,  though,  try  to  be  "multi  protocol" clients. They try to
  support Twitter, identi.ca and generic StatusNet. Plus, they  have  an
  awful user interface.

  Guess what, I wrote my own client: sn2mail[5].

  As  the  name  implies,  it's no interactive client. Instead, it polls
  StatusNet (via cron) and sends an  e-mail  for  each  new  message.  A
  second script can be used to post messages.

  Together  with  the usual mail tools (Mutt, Exim, procmail), this is a
  pretty comfortable setup. All StatusNet messages end up in a mail box.
  Mutt allows for proper threading. I can write messages in Vim.

  I  really  like  converting  stuff to e-mail. I do this for RSS feeds,
  too.  E-mail is a nice thing, there's nice tools to work with it, it's
  fast  and it's asynchronous. The most important thing, though, is that
  e-mail is generic channel  for  communication.  You  can  use  it  for
  everything text-related.

  ____________________

  1. https://github.com/vain/ttyfire

  2. http://tools.suckless.org/ii/

  3. http://tmux.sf.net

  4. http://status.net

  5. https://github.com/vain/sn2mail