Talky 2 is coming; a word about Otalk

We’ve been hard at work on the next generation of Talky for months and we're getting close.

We think Talky 2 is going to help make group meetings better and simpler.

What's new in Talky 2?

  • HD video group conversations with 25+ people
  • text chat
  • audio-only modes
  • low-bandwidth modes
  • dramatically improved UX

…and more.

Why we care

As a distributed team, there are very few conversations we have that don’t involve a Talky session.

It’s as core to our work as any other piece of software in our belt, so we’re motivated to make it the best we possibly can.

In fact, we’re so eager to solve this problem that we’ve pointed our entire focus as a company into this area.

We’re proud of the team working on Talky 2.

Karolina Szczur and Philip Roberts are creating an all-new interface we think you’ll enjoy.

Meanwhile, Lance Stout, Philipp Hancke, and Peter Saint-Andre (in collaboration with the Jitsi team among others) are pushing forward some tried-and-true approaches and forging new Internet standards for group video conversations.

Fritzy, Hjon, and our friends at Steamclock have put a lot of effort into creating tools that will enable us to add these features over time to our native iOS app.

And Bear and Marcus Stong have created an operational foundation for rapidly building and scaling communication and collaboration applications, which we can run for you or help you run on your own hardware. (If you're interested, we’d love to talk.)

Talky and Otalk

With Talky, we aren’t just building a product.

We’re massively investing energy into open-source technology that will empower modern communication and collaboration apps to be built with open technologies, including tools that will make it easier to build native WebRTC applications for iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Otalk provides the foundation for Talky. It’s a suite of completely open and standards-based tools for making modern communication a delightful user and developer experience—and it’s all open sourced.

Creating these technologies represents a mammoth undertaking. Otalk is nothing less than the culmination of everything our team members have learned from building and scaling realtime systems since the 90s, combined with everything we’ve learned in the last five years about building realtime apps for web and mobile.

Talky 2 will be the first software we’ve released built entirely on top of Otalk.

Why are we doing this Otalk thing?

As firm proponents of the Open Web, we naturally believe in the power of Open Communication.

There are Really Big Things™ that the Open Web makes more possible than any previous human invention. Things like democracy, equality, freedom, and distribution of power.

The Web is rapidly evolving. More and more of our experience on the web rely on extremely advanced technologies—the majority of which are closed silos.

It’s nearly impossible to build a quality communication app without either a deep understanding of a huge swath of tech or by leveraging one of a small handful of private services—let alone doing it in an open and interoperable way. That's not good enough.

Alan Kay famously said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

At &yet, we're more than a little concerned that the trend of the web is toward consolidation of power and oligarchy.

We’re not opposed to business in general (we are one); we simply believe there’s a better future waiting to be invented and we're not afraid to try.

Join us

Want to be the first to know when Talky 2 is ready and stay up to date on Otalk? Want to give us input and feedback to help guide features? Join our community! We can't be &yet without &you.

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