Why not fix all the bugs that are there before lunching new products/features?
Slack Platform Launch
101–110 of 226 posts
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the expected loss from a malicious actor with access to those logs cloning your product (without any access to the actual people who thought up your product!) is often more than balanced by the expected benefit from getting everyone on a knowledge base with a brilliant UX. Sure, you wouldn't have wanted to host the Apollo Program's lab notes on Soviet servers, but your cat selfie startup isn't quite as high-s…
Yeah, what you just said is probably the case for the majority of Slack's users, and I get that. My perspective is framed by working with an EMS provider (PCB design & assembly) who does business in some highly regulated fields. We've started using Slack in the last couple months for some of our teams, and love it, but the idea of using it as a catch all strikes me as questionable. If we used Slack for actually talki…
I own a contract manufacturing company in China, had similar concerns. We implemented an open source Slack alternative that runs on our own server. Project is called Zulip --> https://github.com/zulip/zulip
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Abrkn's law was born.
Brekken's Law (assuming that's his surname from the email in his profile). It's a snowclone of Zawinski's law of software development[1]: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. It really is true. My previous employer had a dream of turning their extremely specific web app into a platform, with an app store and everything. I assume…
It's a snarky observation that hides an important insight: email is the most important thing that the internet does.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#104Facebook F8 all over again in the sense of startups throwing the success or failure of their company onto a proprietary centralized system that can block or cut them off for any reason.
Or rather, another incarnation of IRC chat bots, email listservs, and stuff that's been around forever as commodity autoresponders, only now it's worth millions in investments to write the equivalent of a weekend hack IRC bot because of artificial scarcity imposed by a non-open platform.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genuine question -- how how is it been a revelation? It seems to be very similar to HipChat, which was just an iteration on previous chat systems.
The difference is people like using it. UX counts for a lot. The massive amount of integrations for it helps a lot too. Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company, not just a chatroom service.
> a giant log for everything in your company
The lawyers and Congressional subcommittees are going to love this.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company..." Why would you ever want to entrust a log of everything in your company to a third party service? Honestly curious.
Because the expected loss from a malicious actor with access to those logs cloning your product (without any access to the actual people who thought up your product!) is often more than balanced by the expected benefit from getting everyone on a knowledge base with a brilliant UX. Sure, you wouldn't have wanted to host the Apollo Program's lab notes on Soviet servers, but your cat selfie startup isn't quite as high-s…
But Slack isn't just used for discussions. It's used for sharing. People send files through slack -- files that probably contain sensitive data, code, financials, etc. People pass secret sharing URLs (think Google Docs' "anyone with the link can access") through it. If we're being honest, probably some people exchange passwords over it. People directly grant OAuth access to other services for "integrations". Some people do "ChatOps" -- literally controlling production servers through chat -- over Slack.
And then what if Slack gets hacked?
http://slackhq.com/post/114696167740/march-2015-security-inc...
Q: Were my messages taken/read/accessed?
If you have not been explicitly informed by us in a separate
communication that we detected suspicious activity involving
your Slack account, we are very confident that there was no
unauthorized access to any of your team data (such as messages
or files).
Yikes.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#107Facebook F8 all over again in the sense of startups throwing the success or failure of their company onto a proprietary centralized system that can block or cut them off for any reason. Or rather, another incarnation of IRC chat bots, email listservs, and stuff that's been around forever as commodity autoresponders, only now it's worth millions in investments to write the equivalent of a weekend hack IRC bot because…
I upvoted, but I don't think I agree.
There are lots of people building things on proprietary platforms all the time. Why single out FB and Slack? AWS is proprietary. Twilio is proprietary. It's not as if it's hard to find examples.
And so what if some small team implements an auto responder bot and gets a couple hundred thousand in investment?
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is people like using it. UX counts for a lot. The massive amount of integrations for it helps a lot too. Their goal, from what I've read, is to be a giant log for everything in your company, not just a chatroom service.
> a giant log for everything in your company The lawyers and Congressional subcommittees are going to love this.
big companies [in the US] already largely deal with retention/e-discovery requirements.
there are many, many offerings, like Google Apps Vault, to facilitate this.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#109Wonder if their stack is still PHP/MySQL etc?[0]
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#110Facebook F8 all over again in the sense of startups throwing the success or failure of their company onto a proprietary centralized system that can block or cut them off for any reason. Or rather, another incarnation of IRC chat bots, email listservs, and stuff that's been around forever as commodity autoresponders, only now it's worth millions in investments to write the equivalent of a weekend hack IRC bot because…
I upvoted, but I don't think I agree. There are lots of people building things on proprietary platforms all the time. Why single out FB and Slack? AWS is proprietary. Twilio is proprietary. It's not as if it's hard to find examples. And so what if some small team implements an auto responder bot and gets a couple hundred thousand in investment?
One difference is that with AWS you're the paying customer and have leverage. With FB or Slack, you're a non-paying "partner" and your leverage is almost null.