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…