In another life, I'd join Slack and build out the future of business comms.
Here's a few things I'd try to build as Fantasy-PM of Slack:
1. Kill more email. Right now, slack greatly reduces the amount of email we send internally. That's 'intra', but where's 'inter'?
I should be able to ping other people in other companies just as easily as I do my own team. All I need is their slack handle.
2. Public channels - I'd love to be sitting in a Product Hunt chatroom throughout the day, or a "tech news" channel where articles get posted and people who's opinion I care about banter.
3. Eliminate the "contact us"/helpdesk abyss, by letting each company have a "suggestion box" or help channel that they can be contacted in.
There's no way that LinkedIn should be the end-all-be-all of business networking.
Slack is one of the few companies that has the influencers and viral growth to actually challenge LinkedIn for this position. I hope it gets there because the more products I use of Slack-quality, the better.
@ShaanVP I'm particularly interested to see what they do with #2. Increasingly (as evidenced by this very post), people are creating public rooms but Slack isn't designed for that. It's a hack right now. While it's probably wise for them to continue focusing on internal team communication, there's a clear opportunity to expand to more consumer use cases.
We use and love Slack. Rarely do we email each other now.
@ShaanVP Like @rrhoover, I'd love to work on #2 most too. I believe that is the most powerful use of Slack outside enterprise. It will be fascinating to see how they develop their consumer product!
@ShaanVP I was thinking about the old mIRC times the other day. You had this public channels with various topics. Immediately I started thinking how Slack is somehow a modern version of mIRC made for teams and companies. It would be so cool that Slack could provide these public channels where people could gather and debate about different topics. I think this is an interesting topic that a lot of people would use.
A few weeks ago, I discovered private Slack groups for writers, engineers, artists — and almost every interest group you could imagine.
Slack does not currently offer discovery features for these groups, and I built this site to help you access them. A few groups I have found:
1) A support group for startup CEO’s to talk about their struggles.
2) A private Slack group for the Bitcoin community.
3) A Slack group for lonely, one person IT Departments.
I always thought of Slack as an amazing enterprise product, and I never realized how many interest based Slack micro-communities like this exist.
If you're in a private Slack group, please add it to this list. If not, I am hoping that this site inspires you to start a group and meet new people who share a passion.
I launched this site yesterday and our word-of-mouth traffic has been pretty amazing so far. It proves that Slack has a massive future beyond enterprise.
I'm excited to see where the project goes and would love to talk with anyone at Slack about my learnings so far!
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@jmj This is really interesting to me. Is Slack Chats an aggregator? I clicked through and it routed me to a different URL where I needed to signup (enter my email) again for a second time. Wondering if there is a way to reduce friction.
@bootstrapnyc We are creating a place to discover private Slack Groups. We only ask for sign up if you want to comment or add groups. Otherwise you should be able to view the groups and use the product. Thanks for your feedback!
@jmj Love this. Just joined the ruby group on there :D
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@jmj Jeff, great site! What tech stacks is slack-chats built on? Is it based on frameworks like telesc.pe or from scratch solutions? Would love to know more as I'm creating my own version of a content aggregate community site.
@jmj This is awesome Jeff!
It's been super fun to build my Slack for nomads http://hashtagnomads.com, it's almost at 1,400 members now. Someone said that's one of the biggest Slack groups around but I'm not sure. We have 350 active daily users (25%) and #nomads has spawned lots of meetups, friendships and even relationships (!) already (when will the first Slack babies happen?).
Honestly I like how Slack is okay with everyone adapting its platform to their needs. They could easily shut down everything but I think they're interested themselves to where all these different use cases for it go.
To be honest, if they can improve their mobile app a bit and make it as smooth as Whatsapp, Telegram and LINE, then I think they have a big shot at the global messaging market too.
We've discussed opening a Product Hunt Slack room -- and we might do it -- but I'm afraid it might be too distracting and ultimately bifurcate the conversation off the site. Thoughts?
@rrhoover I've thought about that a lot too. I think it would enhance it more than take away. And you could set some simple ground rules to guide the kinds of conversation you want to see there.
@rrhoover I think it would cannibalize the experience in weird ways. As a Slack user, I think the draw would be powerful, meaning Product Hunters that do have it would probably gravitate toward the room. But not everyone uses Slack, and those that don't would have to set up yet another account just to participate in the room, or face a diminished experience on the site.
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@rrhoover Well part of the problem with PH is chat is limited to specific products, even if the context isn't (like this one). And once the product falls off today's list, chat pretty much stops all together (with maybe one or two comments the next couple of days).
I've thought having a place to discuss non-PH items with PHers. Granted that now seems to happen on twitter, but you can't easily do longer form discussions there. I think having a PH branded slack room wouldn't take away from PH, but provide a way for people to discuss news of the day, concerns, and life.
@rrhoover Or maybe a Product Hunt forum/chat section. Not sure yet what you could call it but it will be more for general discussions rather than specific products. Either way, whether it be on-site or on Slack, I think you guys will pull it off perfectly :)
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@rrhoover would love to see PH slack integrations as a good start!
I personally don't have time for a persistent chat community but I'm sure some people would benefit
Super interesting jmj. I get asked a lot if slack can be used for building a community and I always tell people that it's really made for internal employee communication. I stand corrected.
@DavidSpinks thanks for the feedback! This would have been a much better solution than our Facebook groups back in the day :)
The one challenge would be onboarding users who aren't familiar with Slack and making sure they stay involved in the conversation. They're already on Facebook which is one advantage for FB.
That said, Slack is such a better experience and I'd choose their solution if I built a community again!
@DavidSpinks More intimate and less noise. When on Facebook, you are distracted by a million other things. The community experience becomes less meaningful when you get an Angry Birds invite while giving product feedback :)
@jmj good thoughts. I think the one value that fb provides is that people are already there which you mentioned. Actually working on a product in this space, would love your feedback sometime.
@jmj Also just realized that this same kind of product would be valuable for helping people find great facebook groups since there's no great way to see curated groups through fb.
I personally find that my life is filled with too much techno-babble and noise as it is. Joining a new Slack group would turn on yet another firehose of information (which I've already experience by joining a few slack groups). As far as I'm concerned, no matter how "relevant" the information is, if it's coming at me at a volume and velocity that I can't consume, then it's noise.
I like that these PH discussions are encapsulated around specific products and their makers/users. They are context-and-time-bound, which makes them easier for me to consume.
@alirtariq Interesting perspective. I am a member of a few Slack groups and that information flow is very manageable. I agree that there is too much noise in the world and you have to curate your groups/information sources very carefully. Thanks for the feedback!
@jmj Don't get me wrong - I use Slack all the time at work. And it's really awesome to see so many sub-communities (sub-Slacks?) in existence, which Slack Chats does a good job of displaying.
I just know I won't be able to keep up :)
Free Code Camp has nearly 7k people in one Slack channel. Is anyone part of a bigger Slack than this? There have been some scalability issues so far (the mobile app completely stopped working with this many people in the room). They've fixed this on their new beta iPhone app, but I do worry about whether they can handle the 100k we may hit by 2016.
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Getting an error when trying to login through twitter. Just thought I'd give a heads up. Love the idea though.
Terrible horrible no good very bad ideas
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