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Slack Platform Launch

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Re: Slack Platform Launch

#151

Post by matthewmacleod »

babuskov wrote: post #146
wh-uws wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THANK YOU. This is why slack is winning. They took many of the concepts of what makes irc great abd put a much better user experience on top. Why is that so hard for people to understand? This happens over and over again. - Google wasn't the first search engine. - Facebook wasn't the first social network. - Microsoft didn't build the first operating system. They all just did it in a way that appealed to mass amounts…

I have no idea why you were down-voted. It's the truth. Now, to answer why is it so hard to understand? Many people here are programmers/engineers and fail to understand how marketing and nice packaging can sell. Especially if they are old enough to know how IRC works. To extend what you wrote, I'd compare Slack with iPhone. All the tech. to build the iPhone was there, but Apple managed to put it all together in beau…

Yes, we all know and agree with their statement, but it's also not what was being said.

UI is absolutely important to getting users on to a platform It's also a totally distinct issue from the network used for communication. There's no reason we can't have a good UX with an open protocol too, and that's what was being talked about.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#152

Post by porker »

pkrumins wrote: post #7

Does anyone know how you can apply for a Slack Fund grant? I'd love to create a Browserling integration. Browserling (www.browserling.com) is a live interactive cross-browser testing service and this integration would let you embed a live browser directly in Slack. Use case: Let's say a user reports a bug in IE10 on Windows 7 in your webapp. You just use `/browserling windows7 ie10 URL` command in Slack and that will…

Can you give me a pitch why I'd use Browserling instead of Browserstack?

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#153

Post by ladzoppelin »

michael_fine wrote: post #21
tomasien wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack makes a ton of money and it is unimaginable to me (and many others) that it's not going to be a massive force. It has been a revelation to literally every entrepreneur I know - and I'm from Virginia not SV (although I recently moved to NYC - same deal). Now that it has established itself beyond almost any doubt, its INVESTORS have established an $80M bet around those who make the company a core component of the…

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.

Honestly, also not being in SV, I think it could be the biggest thing for companies since email. Nobody in our 400 person shop wants to use anything but Slack. Its completely changed the company culture, brought together different teams, opened up a real time log of what ops is doing (employee worth), consolidated communications, searchable file server. The list goes on and on. Nobody wants to use email and most people despise JIRA (in our small company). Everybody from every department is trying really hard to integrate everything they do into Slack and Slack keeps making it easier.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#154

Post by pkrumins »

porker wrote: post #152
pkrumins wrote: post #7

Does anyone know how you can apply for a Slack Fund grant? I'd love to create a Browserling integration. Browserling (www.browserling.com) is a live interactive cross-browser testing service and this integration would let you embed a live browser directly in Slack. Use case: Let's say a user reports a bug in IE10 on Windows 7 in your webapp. You just use `/browserling windows7 ie10 URL` command in Slack and that will…

Can you give me a pitch why I'd use Browserling instead of Browserstack?

We're the first company to offer live interactive testing starting 2010.

We're mad open source fans and have open sourced hundreds of libraries including browserify, dnode, node-png, and many others (http://www.catonmat.net/blog/browserling-open-sources-90-nod...).

We're constantly inventing new things (http://www.catonmat.net/blog/top-10-browserling-inventions/).

We're a small and enthusiastic team, so we can quickly respond and adapt to our customer needs.

Zero inbox, quick response times is how we roll.

Our customers love us and we love them.

I give my phone number (415-423-1954) to everyone. Call me at night to chat about yesterday's football game or to yell at me that IE6 doesn't work on XP.

And finally we love to have fun at Browserling and we started our own nerdy webcomic about web developers and browsers https://lol.browserling.com.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#155

Post by wodenokoto »

cromwellian wrote: post #142
oskarth wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are right that it's very similar to IRC etc you are completely missing the fundamental reason Slack et al are popular: user experience, especially for non-technical people. Not everyone grew up on IRC with bouncers, irssi on a remote server, and their own server where they could upload attachments to in a single keystroke. Now it's true that there are new alternatives for non-technical people such as IRCClo…

I understand why slack is popular, I use it. But Slack's success is it's UI, and that is not dependent on a centralized close protocol. We could have a rich ecosystem of competing chat clients over a distributed messaging bus, it's just that there's no economic viability in it. If SMTP were re-invented today, it would never be open and federated.

A big part of a good chat UI is the knowledge of how things looks in the other end.

Real world friendships have ended because of how emoji are rendered differently on different phones.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#156

Post by pkrumins »

el_benhameen wrote: post #88
pkrumins wrote: post #7

Does anyone know how you can apply for a Slack Fund grant? I'd love to create a Browserling integration. Browserling (www.browserling.com) is a live interactive cross-browser testing service and this integration would let you embed a live browser directly in Slack. Use case: Let's say a user reports a bug in IE10 on Windows 7 in your webapp. You just use `/browserling windows7 ie10 URL` command in Slack and that will…

I would use this. And I'm going to check out browserling now, too. This looks really useful.

Great! I'll build it. We've already built all the necessary pieces.

1. We've browser sharing scheme:

    www.browserling.com/browse/Platform/PlatfomVersion/Browser/BrowserVersion/URL
For example:

    www.browserling.com/browse/win/vista/ie/9/news.ycombinator.com
(Loads Hacker News in IE 9 on Windows Vista)

2. We've Live API (https://www.browserling.com/api) that hundreds of people use and that let you already embed real browsers in your webapps.

Combining these gives you great super powers.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#157

Post by lmm »

tomasien wrote: post #14
ossreality wrote: post #9

I'm sorry, I've scoffed at other valuations and investments, but I'm just completely beside myself. Why does a chat room need "apps"? It's kind of weird actually. There's two sorts of people that defend these announcements, I've found: The first thinks that they are going to build an "amazing" platform some day and that they'll follow this model for "growing revenue". So of course they defend it. And then there's the…

Have you ever even USED Slack? The apps are amazing, it's 50% of why people use Slack. There have been apps since I've known about it which has been almost since it launched.

Slack's integrations are less powerful than many alternatives. Every chat system has integration options. They have very little to do with Slack's popularity.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#158

Post by Kiro »

cromwellian wrote: post #104

Facebook 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've probably been on IRC longer than most people and I believe Slack is superior in most ways.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#159

Post by dvdplm »

cromwellian wrote: post #104

Facebook 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…

> a proprietary centralized system that can block or cut them off for any reason.

As a startup founder – chatlio.com – betting on the Slack "platform" I have to say that it feels pretty great to know that they are not planning on cutting us off tomorrow morning... :) Might happen anyway of course, but this announcement means we can work somewhat more serenely for a while longer. I see this as a kind of "stability pledge" to third party dev shops.

Re: Slack Platform Launch

#160

Post by tommorris »

cromwellian wrote: post #104

Facebook 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…

> 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.

Nope, it has value because it can be used by people who aren't massive nerds.

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