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Twist – Mindful Team Communication

twistapp.com

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Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#61

Post by twobyfour »

jpolitz wrote: post #60

I think this has lots of potential. I have thought before that if I could make two changes to Slack (which I already think is pretty great), they would be: 1. Hitting "Enter" doesn't send the message. This encourages writing actual paragraphs in response, rather than sending fragments of sentences that can be interrupted across multiple lines because you're not really sure if you've finished your sentence just yet oh…

Threads are pretty awful. It's really easy for messages and discussions to get lost in them and for participants not to realize that more has been said.

Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#63

Post by mdeeks »

Diederich wrote: post #32
devrandomguy wrote: post #13

Right off the bat, this has much better performance on my laptop than Slack; Slack really spins the fans. Also, that extra layer of organization provided by the thread column was needed badly. I personally was hoping for tags and tag-groups in Slack, but this should also do nicely. We have been using Slack as a UI for our backend services, for example, and it is a great way to present reports and alerts, and offer ba…

Curious: I've always used slack from a web browser rather than their native app. What, if anything, do you personally miss from the web app in slack?

The native app gives you a red badge when there are unread items which I find super useful. I also like that I can cmd+tab to it without having to fish for the right tab in Chrome. Sometimes I completely close Chrome and forget that Slack isn't open anymore and I wont be notified when people are trying to reach me.

Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#64

Post by lillesvin »

amix wrote: post #18
mistaken wrote: post #15

Hmm. It seems that these chat applications are more and more becoming like a polished webmail system. Now they've introduced threads, it's searchable forever, you can mail erm. I mean send messages to individuals or even groups. This new technology is amazing. Seriously there is nothing wrong with using e-mail (apart from the dated protocol) and for knowledge sharing your team is better of with some kind of wiki with…

Why not just use email? This was asked by a ton of people and we have addressed it here: https://help.twistapp.com/hc/articles/115003654589 Email is great and we are fans of it, but not for internal team communication.

The question that immediately came to my mind was, "why not NNTP?"

Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#65

Post by ropiku »

devrandomguy wrote: post #13

Right off the bat, this has much better performance on my laptop than Slack; Slack really spins the fans. Also, that extra layer of organization provided by the thread column was needed badly. I personally was hoping for tags and tag-groups in Slack, but this should also do nicely. We have been using Slack as a UI for our backend services, for example, and it is a great way to present reports and alerts, and offer ba…

Looked at the Twist mac app and looks all native, using Swift. Unlike Slack which is an Electron webapp.

Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#66

Post by ghthor »

twobyfour wrote: post #61
jpolitz wrote: post #60

I think this has lots of potential. I have thought before that if I could make two changes to Slack (which I already think is pretty great), they would be: 1. Hitting "Enter" doesn't send the message. This encourages writing actual paragraphs in response, rather than sending fragments of sentences that can be interrupted across multiple lines because you're not really sure if you've finished your sentence just yet oh…

Threads are pretty awful. It's really easy for messages and discussions to get lost in them and for participants not to realize that more has been said.

This is a UI/UX problem. You can make the same argument about an unorganized spew tube that I now have to spend 50% of my cognitive ability to organize into a threaded conversation manually in my head.

Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#69

Post by edoceo »

Alex3917 wrote: post #59
mistaken wrote: post #15

Hmm. It seems that these chat applications are more and more becoming like a polished webmail system. Now they've introduced threads, it's searchable forever, you can mail erm. I mean send messages to individuals or even groups. This new technology is amazing. Seriously there is nothing wrong with using e-mail (apart from the dated protocol) and for knowledge sharing your team is better of with some kind of wiki with…

> Seriously there is nothing wrong with using e-mail (apart from the dated protocol) and for knowledge sharing your team is better of with some kind of wiki with organized information. I'm the co-founder of https://www.fwdeveryone.com , which implements the same sort of functionality on top of email. This way you can capture both the knowledge created within your organization, and also conversations between your cowo…

> Wikis are great, but maintaining them is basically a full time job, which is why they tend to be terrible and out of date

Good documentation is a full time job, via Wiki or whatever. It's not the Wiki's fault it's out of date.

Re: Twist – Mindful Team Communication

#70

Post by twobyfour »

ghthor wrote: post #66
twobyfour wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threads are pretty awful. It's really easy for messages and discussions to get lost in them and for participants not to realize that more has been said.

This is a UI/UX problem. You can make the same argument about an unorganized spew tube that I now have to spend 50% of my cognitive ability to organize into a threaded conversation manually in my head.

Huh, I've never found following concurrent conversations in Slack particularly challenging, but then I spent a lot of time a handful of years back in fast-moving chats that often had several unrelated discussions going on at once. Maybe it's a learned skill.

That said, in 3 years at Slack-heavy companies, the level of interleaved conversation I've encountered is almost nil. Maybe that's cultural (though the consistency across multiple companies and teams suggests not). Maybe company or team size is a factor. Maybe it's a matter of breaking it out into enough channels that if there are multiple topics to discuss at once they're usually happening in separate channels anyway.

Sure, Slack could probably improve the threads UI. (Though I happen to think that threaded display and real-time discussion are in some ways conflicting goals.) As it stands, however, they're a black hole. My team has actually banned the use of threads (and no, it wasn't even my suggestion).

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