I've never used Slack, but people keep saying that it's good because of the apps. What sort of apps are those?
They are pretty much integrations. Access APIs of different platforms and manipulate / gather data.
Slack Platform Launch
121–130 of 226 posts
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#122Facebook 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?
You're not making fair comparisons.
FB and Slack are platforms in which you write directly for it and it cannot be used or moved elsewhere.
AWS provides many things but, unless you're directly integrating with them, you can move onto another service if you need to (and even direct integration you can later abstract and move away from many of their services to alternatives). Same with Twilio; they provide SMS and other like services but others do as well so you can move your app to any platform with, mostly, minor code changes.
You can't make a minor code change to move your Facebook or Slack app to another vendor / platform. In fact that wouldn't really make sense.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#123Earlier 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.
Good point. Maybe Salesforce is a better example. Or Github. Don't people build tons of integrations on it?
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Consumers pay for iOS, but Apple still bans you from selling your app in the store.
The gatekeeper function of the platform means they can shut you off at any time.
If instead, Slack published a protocol so anyone could author a client, then bots would just be normal chat users, for the most part, on par with regular users, and a bot would simply be something you deploy somewhere to sit in your channels, just like IRC bots.
I think Slack is a great app, very good UI, but I'm a little sick of proprietary messaging. We really don't need proprietary centralized messaging networks. Standardize a federated open protocol and let people compete on the clients and let the community agree on extensions to message payloads that clients pay attention to, or ignore.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#125Earlier 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?
Yeah after we started hooking it up now I get all these notifications for builds, etc. I don't need any of this notifying me but I need notifications for other types of messages.
Right now I'm not seeing a difference between this and HipChat but everyone seems to love it so I'll use it I'm just kinda indifferent and unimpressed with it thus far.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#126Earlier 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?
If you use OS X, go into System Preferences -> Notifications -> Slack and set slack alert style to "None".
There, you now have sound and no banner-style alerts. You can customise a lot more and all apps that are able to do notifications go through there.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#127Earlier 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?
You're not making fair comparisons. FB and Slack are platforms in which you write directly for it and it cannot be used or moved elsewhere. AWS provides many things but, unless you're directly integrating with them, you can move onto another service if you need to (and even direct integration you can later abstract and move away from many of their services to alternatives). Same with Twilio; they provide SMS and othe…
Fair enough. See my sibling comment about Salesforce and Github which I think are better examples. Or the iOS and Android platforms.
My point is that we have certain implicit biases (I too hate FB and Salesforce as platforms) but those biases aren't really based on some kind of general principle that "proprietary platforms are always bad and dangerous".
Proprietary platforms run by untrustworthy companies are bad and dangerous.
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
But companies usually pay for Slack? You pretty much have to to get full history.
Consumers pay for iOS, but Apple still bans you from selling your app in the store. The gatekeeper function of the platform means they can shut you off at any time. If instead, Slack published a protocol so anyone could author a client, then bots would just be normal chat users, for the most part, on par with regular users, and a bot would simply be something you deploy somewhere to sit in your channels, just like IR…
Yeah it's a shame XMPP turned out to be unable to keep up with the shift from desktop to mobile. Maybe we should take a crack at a more modern alternative?
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
But companies usually pay for Slack? You pretty much have to to get full history.
Consumers pay for iOS, but Apple still bans you from selling your app in the store. The gatekeeper function of the platform means they can shut you off at any time. If instead, Slack published a protocol so anyone could author a client, then bots would just be normal chat users, for the most part, on par with regular users, and a bot would simply be something you deploy somewhere to sit in your channels, just like IR…
[deleted]
Re: Slack Platform Launch
#130Earlier 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.
I moved my company off Slack to Hipchat as the latter has more useful integrations for us, and does not have the same limitations (you are not limited to ten integrations on the free version of Hipchat) or the stupidly high price of Slack. There are parts we don’t like about Hipchat (the shortcuts for the emoticons are just weird ), but we are using it company-wide where Slack was just used by developers (and Hangout…
Would you mind giving some examples of what are more useful integrations for you that Slack does not support? I am curious because we--at work--have been using HipChat for around two years and have integrated HipChat into our processes, yet now that we are exploring and using Slack (for another project), we find the integrations and APIs so much better to work with.