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Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

blog.doist.com

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Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#171

Post by balladeer »

skMed wrote: post #146

So basically a forum? Knowledge Management is a broad topic and it's hilarious seeing the same solutions brought up again and again. I have all this persistent information! New people need to get up to speed fast - where do I put it? Cue the Wiki fad. I have to get things done and elicit quick feedback ASAP! Cue the Chat fad. I want async communication so I'm not bogged down all the time! Email and Forums. There's a…

Until a firm starts enforcing a tool like Slack as the default mode of communication organization wide; and worse still if you are expected to be, or kind of, always on.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#172

Post by unabst »

The problem with Slack and the like is that it's communication based, not work based.

The problem with Todoist and Wunderlist and the like is that it's work based, not communication based.

Slack is awesome at communicating. But it has no checklist, no todo, no collaboration tools that fulfill most needs. They're all half baked.

Wunderlist has checklists and todos and can be used to track collaboration efforts by linking Google Docs or Sheets to a task for example, but communication is still horrible. It's nowhere close to being a main communications channel.

So most end up using a combination of apps.

But this is also one of the greatest detriments to productivity. Having to juggle apps.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#173

Post by tertius »

unabst wrote: post #172

The problem with Slack and the like is that it's communication based, not work based. The problem with Todoist and Wunderlist and the like is that it's work based, not communication based. Slack is awesome at communicating. But it has no checklist, no todo, no collaboration tools that fulfill most needs. They're all half baked. Wunderlist has checklists and todos and can be used to track collaboration efforts by link…

It looks like this is about a new app from the Todoist guys, not Todoist specifically.

Disclaimer: I love and use Todoist religiously and agree that it's not great at collaboration.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#174

Post by tehlike »

mrisoli wrote: post #163
tehlike wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to say this. Google wave was a pretty good attempt at fixing this. Maybe it was ahead of its time.

Maybe Google Wave was targeted at the wrong segment? I believe it was used as a general communications tool, not specifically for business.

hard to say - i was mostly using it to communicate with opensource developers on nhibernate (iirc, long time ago). I think you are right though, most of the features are things you'd use more for business. Also considering how widely google docs is used, it makes sense.

PS: I am a google employee.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#175

Post by bambax »

it33 wrote: post #132
bambax wrote: post #18

Just went through Startup School that uses Mattermost, which seems to be a Slack clone (not sure since I never used Slack). It didn't seem to work well. Since all members of all groups were from all over the world and rarely shared a timezone, no conversation could really take place in real time. And since there are no threads or topics or anything, it's almost impossible to go back to something that was said a while…

Hi @bambax, Mattermost team here, Appreciate your feedback. The Mattermost instance at Startup School does offer threads, if you either click the "Reply" arrow when you hover over a message or go to the "[...]" menu and select "Reply". If it wasn't easy to discover, that's 100% our fault and we'll see what we can to do make it more prominent in the tutorial and in other ways. Definitely agree threads are crucial to g…

Hi, thanks for reaching out.

Maybe I misspoke. Maybe I meant "tree view" and not "thread".

I was aware of the reply feature, and yes, if you read a reply and you click on the original title, you get to see all messages attached to this original message, in a window to the right, that you can navigate (more or less).

But AFAIK you can't reply to a reply (if you do, it's a reply to the original message); it's probably a feature (back in the days, the Joel on Software forums worked like that, and Joel Spolsky was actively defending this option in various posts).

But it makes it difficult or impossible to actively monitor different threads or topics. Threads are not collapsible. The UI actively favors the more recent messages, you have to actually click on "load more messages" to see earlier messages (and if you change channels and come back, the earlier messages are gone, you have to click again to see them).

Anyway, I don't mean to be negative on the product which is very well polished and works perfectly; it's just that the choices that it makes seem ill suited for a very international and asynchronous crowd.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#176

Post by ferentchak »

unabst wrote: post #172

The problem with Slack and the like is that it's communication based, not work based. The problem with Todoist and Wunderlist and the like is that it's work based, not communication based. Slack is awesome at communicating. But it has no checklist, no todo, no collaboration tools that fulfill most needs. They're all half baked. Wunderlist has checklists and todos and can be used to track collaboration efforts by link…

I was building an app that worked like this on top of Flowdock when I used to work for Rally. Fully integrated work management communication application. If you have a small collaborative team it was awesomely powerful we had used it on the team that built it for about 6 months before the project got cut.

If someone wants a tester or feedback on something they are building I'd love to help. I badly miss that thing :(

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#177

Post by Stratoscope »

linkregister wrote: post #144
Stratoscope wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just the system design, but also the culture. I know a few people who post coherent, properly punctuated and capitalized sentences and paragraphs here on HN, but they write on Slack like this: one line at a time no caps or periods stream of thought enter each time I posted a parody of this style a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11239614

Guilty at charged ^ as

its funny i found out something

i never new

* knew

^ is something else

* is to correct

and never use the edit button!

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#178

Post by burntwater »

hedora wrote: post #105
gengkev wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may seem like a little thing, but you have to be very careful while typing not to accidentally press Enter. I've found this to be surprisingly difficult, and it makes typing a lot more stressful.

For a while gmail had this ui "feature" where or string-of-characters would send an email without prompting. I still fear the web UI. I guess emailing out bullet lists was against the implicit use case the gmail UI team had in mind. Stuff like this definitely changes how tools are used.

This exact problem led to my current behavior that I now use in all email apps: I delete/never fill in the "to" fields leaving that for last. Can't accidentally send an email to nowhere...

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#179

Post by lylo »

keybits wrote: post #82

Where I work we've started using private categories on a Discourse instance for conversations that are 'too big for Slack'. This works really well since Discourse has a selection of notification options (RSS feeds, email, Slack etc), keeps track of discussions well, has great search and has social features such as 'liking' posts. Bonus points for being open source.

I would agree. I tried Twist and it's a really usable app, lovely UI design as you'd expect from the Doist team. But for our 60+ product and engineering team, Discourse does a great job of handling asynchronous threaded discussion – and we can host it on AWS for $20/mo for unlimited users. I'm struggling to see the advantage (UI aside) of Twist at this stage.

Re: Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging

#180

Post by nojvek »

colbyh wrote: post #156
efsavage wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my boss posts something I will assume they found value in it and thinks it is worth the time of X people to read it for information. If they have a question about it, they will ask. If reading it right now matters, they will say so. If they are just trawling for likes and noticing who posts something first, I will find a new boss.

I ignore stuff our CEO posts all the time. there isn't a pretense that everything he shares is a big deal, and if it is something important he'll send in an email or mark it as such. might just be our culture though, there's aren't really any "jockeying for position" situations.

Our CEO IS not on slack. He uses email.

Slack is for small teams which have a lot of shared context

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