Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

Man, that would be amazing. It would be sweet if there was a third party slack notifier that could do that kind of thing. Basically you just run the notifier and quit the main slack app, until the notifier tells you to pull it up. Then you interact with it, and when you're done, quit it again.

Disclaimer: Workplace Partner @ Job

I was cynical about it to begin with, when it was just 'Facebook at Work' but I do believe it addresses a lot of the issues brought up in the blog post and the Workplace team are executing very well.

Accounts are completely separate from Facebook, no crossover at all.

I don't think it's a Slack killer, as they both solve different problems in different ways, and Workplace is very much a 'big co, top down' approach.

I do think other existing collaboration tools have a lot to be worried about between Slack & Workplace though.

Last stat I heard was there is over 14k companies using it.

I think that Slack (or any other IM client for work, really) is just a tool, not a solution. Meaning that it requires some organization and thought, rather than installing and hoping for the best. At least to some extent (i.e. have no idea about companies with hundreds of engineers online), it works. Equally important it is to acknowledge what is suitable for doing on IM and what is not.

If you want to discuss some large changes, sure, IM is a bad place. Conversation will probably get interrupted, derailed, etc. That's where, in my opinion, things like Google Docs or plain simple GH Issues shine. The format forces into better thought out, longer messages.

For other things, you need to organize the chat rooms. If you have 10+ people and 2 chat rooms (I think slack defaults to #general and #random) then yes, sounds bad. But instead having quite a few chat rooms with "Always on", I believe, comes not from the IM itself but from the culture of the company. I know places where everything is e-mail only and people constantly refresh it. Equally, IM is mostly ghost town outside working hours at other places. And Slack has decent notification settings to make sure that you don't go crazy.

So, IM has it's place and provides value if you are willing to make it work. It's just not a 'it just works' solution, which is hardly surprising.

Their "new" approach sounds suspiciously like a mailing list: asynchronous communication for a group that supports threads of communication.

I would agree that culture is a major factor - we briefly implemented Slack a few years back at a company before I left, and I watched it drive our Senior Programmer nuts, as we didn't really have good solid rules or behavioral standards for Slack. I'm not talking about a tome of laws and regulations, but just a few simple things like "Don't spam chats with non-work related items", "Don't spam looking to get someone's attention", etc. The Senior in question was an older guy who had a lot on his plate and and a bit of a short fuse. It absolutely ended up driving him nuts as now instead of relatively quiet and ignorable chat messages, he was getting spammed and pinged by absolutely everyone at once, and those in the office with less on their plate definitely treated Slack like their own IRC channel for shitposting.

Poor support from our management in general, and a poor delineation between private channels and public channels resulted in a lot of private rants being exposed publicly (not just from the Senior), and the end result was Slack was shelved for the time being and the Senior Programmer left the company.

My new place of employment utilized a multi-tiered approach, using Skype for quicker questions (with rooms dedicated to specific topics or aspects of the work), and anything requiring more than a sentence or two of background being regulated to an internal message board system. Our management is quick to shut down too much spam, and everyone in general is taught about the expected etiquete of the chat.

Without such precautions, I think it's too easy to fall into the more casual "shitposting" that is common for message boards and the chatrooms of old. Workplace chats are meant for very narrow and specific purposes, and it needs to be enforced that these are not the places to be spamming the latest gif you found on reddit/imgur.