Five Across InterComm v1 review

On Monday I posted my initial thoughts about the new IM product InterComm from Five Across. If you haven’t downloaded it (and I recommend you do) here is a good screen shot of it (from the Five Across website):

The first thing I noticed was the nice UI. It’s pretty intuitive and graphically appealing.

The chat feature (which is primarily what I’ve been using so far…more on that in a minute), is good. It could use a little ping when a new message comes in, even when the window is active (like if you’re looking away from the screen for a second). The “Attention” button in the chat window is nice to get someone’s attention (or drive them nuts ). The other features are good, except it seems like you can’t paste into the application or the chat window…very strange.

Now InterComm isn’t without a few problems (growing pains, really). Since it was launched Monday Kathy Englar from marketing (who called me and was kind enough to take the time to answer my questions and listen to my feedback) said the response has been great from the online world. Because of this there have been some disruptions in connecting (and reconnecting) to the server. Since the product and company are only about three days old I think we can cut them a little slack.

I also got a great reply to my e-mail into support (specifically about all the disconnects) here’s part of the reply:

“We are looking into the problem with InterComm dropping connections. It seems to have stemmed from the sudden deluge of traffic we experienced when our app went live; it exceeded our expectations.

Thanks for taking the time to write. We are likely to release a bug-fix update in the next couple of days, and hopefully we can improve the performance of the connections so they don’t drop so much.“

The disconnects are my biggest gripe. I set up a public and private groups, invited a few friends, but I think the on again, off again it keeping InterComm from being useful. Essentially no one appears to be on much of the time. Often you think you’re online, but you’re not and your friend is wondering why you’re not responding (and you might be as well).

That being said I do have some feature requests/suggestions:

• Find a way so if you want to invite a person from one group into another group you don’t have to retype their name and e-mail address. Something like Invite existing contacts.

• Add encryption in the free and Pro versions. A nice, light tool like this would be perfect for WiFi hotspots and other less than secure environments.

• A little more something to get your attention when IMs come in (as above) would be great

• Pasting into the IM window

• Clickable URLs

I’m looking forward to using InterComm more and the next update. Hopefully the connections will stabilise and more people (especially the folks I’m working with) will connect and stay connected.

As I said on Monday and earlier today I think this app has a lot of potential for companies to deploy an easy and more feature rich) IM client in their company. I feel strongly that in order for a company to deploy enterprise IM it has to be easy for people to use and connect outside the company. InterComm starts to fit that bill. And if people want to use it with family and friend while at work, the application is free and can be used by both OS X and Windows users. That is a definite plus.

I’m sure I’ll have more later…