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Slack Platform Launch

slackhq.com

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Re: Slack Platform Launch

#111

Post by endymi0n »

stephengillie wrote: post #90
Fishkins wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, by far the biggest difference is the notifications. In HipChat, notifications are both buggy and almost completely unconfigurable[0]. If I sent a message to a colleague while they were offline, they would never get notified of it[1]. Slack notifications always work how I expect and are configurable to the degree I desire. Slack also has a nicer UI and better integrations for us, and generally just always work…

Slack is one of my most annoying and least-effective tools because every single message has a pop up that blocks off a corner of my screen. Slack's notifications lack customization which makes them annoying. Either you get the whole package, intrusive desktop pop up and all, or you get no notification. Where's the option to have sounds but no pop ups? Where's the option to lump notifications so you don't get spammed?

Maybe you can't customize notifications extensively in Slack itself (I found them okay, yet slightly lacking), but if you're on a Mac, you can definitely comfigure Desktop notifications per App, which I also did.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#112

Post by chopete »

It is yammer all over again http://i.imgur.com/DKODqy3.png

I can't help but post this based on my experience pitching to vendors to join an app store.

Slack CEO: Yammer made $1.2B. We need to make $12B. For that I need to make a hit song with 10,000 background dancers with me on the stage.

Board: How much can you pay each dancer?.

CEO: $10/hr

Board: Ok. Announce an App Store.

You are already a hero and there are hundreds of them to jump on stage to dance with you in that 5 minute song.

CEO: Now you are talking!

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#113

Post by netcan »

rfrank wrote: post #55
radlad wrote: post #22

Earlier 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.

"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.

First, because the (perceived) risk is relatively small, both of damage and the chances of damage.

Second (this is the point I think hn-like forums grossly underestimate) is because the alternatives are not really alternatives. In practice the likelihood of using Irc or some open source chat within a company with the same wide buy in as slack (or Skype etc) is 0.

The way to judge this is adoption.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#114

Post by endymi0n »

lotyrin wrote: post #63
jzelinskie wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a pretty good talk on "chatops" by the guys at GitHub[0]. Basically, it provides a dialog around a "shared command-line" where developers from learn from each other by simply watching chat. I think it's more beneficial to distributed companies. However, my question for those using chatops is basically how do you keep the repository for the bot "tame"? It needs access to _everything_ if you want it to be usefu…

Give the bot runtime (not in the repository, environment variable or something) credentials for a secret storage tool of some kind, where it can then fetch credentials for whatever it's allowed to do.

Securing the bot itseld is definitely a larger challenge, but a heavily shielded box and tools like Vault can go a long way. It's actually not much different to securing other solutions to the problem like Capistrano or Chef, and definitely still better than giving root SSH access to your developers.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#115

Post by mh- »

stephengillie wrote: post #90
Fishkins wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, by far the biggest difference is the notifications. In HipChat, notifications are both buggy and almost completely unconfigurable[0]. If I sent a message to a colleague while they were offline, they would never get notified of it[1]. Slack notifications always work how I expect and are configurable to the degree I desire. Slack also has a nicer UI and better integrations for us, and generally just always work…

Slack is one of my most annoying and least-effective tools because every single message has a pop up that blocks off a corner of my screen. Slack's notifications lack customization which makes them annoying. Either you get the whole package, intrusive desktop pop up and all, or you get no notification. Where's the option to have sounds but no pop ups? Where's the option to lump notifications so you don't get spammed?

totally agree about the lack of customization.

A portion of the difficulty is owing to them using a web app in a SSB (single site browser) instead of a properly native desktop app.

I would love to be able to tile different channel/message windows, like we all did with IRC clients. Unfortunately this is fundamentally intractable in an SSB-architected app (including Electron, node-webkit, et al.).

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#116

Post by asmosoinio »

danmaz74 wrote: post #110
stanleydrew wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But companies usually pay for Slack? You pretty much have to to get full history.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#118

Post by rfrank »

bobjordan wrote: post #102
rfrank wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I feel like I came across that as I was weighing the various options for us to try haha. Zulip is the kind of thing I'd love to give a shot, but I have to take into account people who won't be tech savvy enough to use something like that. Therein lies Slack's value to us.

At the end of the day, Slack is really useful, but I just don't see its use getting expanded much. At least for us. There's lots of stuff that just shouldn't get communicated across there. Coordination across the sides of the business that don't use Slack wasn't an issue in the first place, it was never really even considered afaik.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#119

Post by deathanatos »

kentonv wrote: post #54
nkozyra wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how long it takes to spin something like this up, but you're forgetting maintenance, domain knowledge, internal documentation, etc. People underestimate the costs of "rolling your own" or even going FOSS. It's absolutely never "set it and forget it." Most of these services that charge nominal fees ($5 - $100/mo) are interesting because you don't have to control your own support procedure and ostensibly they'r…

> It's absolutely never "set it and forget it." Have you tried Sandstorm? It is in fact designed to be "set it and forget it" -- that's a major goal of the project. Everything auto-updates, you never have to edit config files, it can configure DNS and fetch/renew SSL certificates automatically, installing new apps takes one click, etc. (Disclosure: I'm the lead developer.)

The "How It works" wasn't bad. But nonetheless: does it distribute itself (and my data) to multiple VMs? If it needs a kernel patch, does it appropriately plan downtimes and/or shed load from that VM before applying the patch and rebooting the instance? Does it handle machine failure?

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#120

Post by stanleydrew »

gkop wrote: post #66
adamseabrook wrote: post #34

No need to build your entire startup on Slack but a solid integration can drive serious initial revenue for your startup especially if you do not get a lot of direct traffic. "One click install" is what helped Woocommerce and others get massive growth on the back of Wordpress through top exposure in the plugin directory. Slack is still very much at the bottom of the growth curve. I have seen electrical contractors wh…

I too am bullish on Slack and am with you right until "wiped out email." I've heard this said about Slack before and don't get it. Asana is a real email killer in that it's both realtime (instant) and structured (i.e. it wholly replaces email threads ). On a meta level, why is it that it's so important for Slack's marketing that they "replace email"? Why isn't it enough for them to "go beyond email" (which is totally…

I don't know whether it's important for Slack's marketing to claim they are replacing email.

What I can tell you is that it factually has wiped out internal email for our team at Charge.

And I think that's pretty common for most teams that have used it. Why write a slow clunky old email when a Slack message will do?

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