The next chapter
We first launched Gitter in private beta in February of this year (2014 for those of you from the future). As developers, we hadn’t found a chat product we really loved and so we embarked on a journey to build something that scratched this itch.
Over the past 6 months we’ve watched the product grow, entirely shaped by the people using it. Boy has it been used in weird and wonderful ways that we had never previously imagined. Beyond the obvious public repository support and internal team collaboration we’ve seen community building at conferences, remote controlling robots, at schools and in education, weird GIF sharing; you name it, people have done it.
Whilst we’ve been listening to feedback and building the product, we’ve also been thinking about who we are and what role we play. We are deeply committed to building communities that bring developers closer together. We believe this enables the creation of greater software and, since we were knee-high to mainframes, we’ve believed that great software is shaping our future. Lofty we know, but hey, you can’t help how you feel.
With this in mind, today we’ve shipped some big changes.
Firstly, we’ve entirely reworked our front page to be a lot more community-centric. We’re showing a live feed of people chatting in any one of our 7,000+ public chat rooms and also highlighting some great public communities. This is just the start of this journey, with the mission of making Gitter the place that developers come to talk and will continue to build out a directory and help people discover great conversations.
Check it out here, existing users may want to sign out or take a look in an incognito browser, because that’s exactly what they were built for…
Secondly, we’re shipping our paid plans, which we pre-announced last week. Much like GitHub, our paid plans cater for private conversations and all of our public rooms will continue to remain free and ad-free.
For those who have been with us on this journey from the start, the good news is that any private room you have created so far will continue to work without needing to pay. Secondly, we are currently emailing out a 6 month 50% discount code as a small way to say thank you for being with us and helping us make Gitter the place it is today.
We look forward to the future with you all. Please, as ever, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us either on Gitter at gitterHQ/gitter, via support, via that old email thing or at any fine establishment around Old Street which serves good ale.
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