20 ms·

Slack Platform Launch

366 points by thejosh 11y ago

spdustin 11y ago
Their dev blog post [0] mentions an AWS Lambda Blueprint to go along with a chatbot framework (BotKit) and an "Add to Slack" workflow. This (AWS Lambda) is a smart move; it reduces the friction of writing a quick integration with Slack considerably, making it almost a commodity-level feature. This bet on AWS Lambda will likely be a big deal for general AWS Lambda adoption, given how insanely popular Slack integrations are. [0]: https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/launch-platform-114754258b91#.jp25qhvsl https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/launch-platform-1147...
kriro 11y ago
I've never used slack and don't know what types of apps they want to integrate but it seems like a disruption of a nice chunk of a market that ERP vendors have ventured into (the job productivity/project management etc. branch). That sounds good because quite frankly often the stuff ERP vendors offer in that space is somewhat lackluster "well we have to be in this area" material. I think the slack platform could eventually branch out into more traditional ERP areas (accounting, production etc.) and it could be an interesting potential shift from "everything from one hand" to "let's configure our ERP from different services" Building a platform like this is nontrivial and there's tons of problems ahead but I like the general idea.
BrainInAJar 11y ago
Christ, they just don't get it... What we need isn't "apps for Slack" what we need is onprem Slack. Because sending confidential information to "the cloud" is all kinds of stupid and potentially violates a bunch of laws
- morbidkk 11y ago
  folks at atlassian (hipchat) are already doing this...it depends which markets one pursuing...slack and hipchat are totally on different scale. Atlassian even didn't make hipchat user numbers public during IPO proceedings
raymondgh 11y ago
That's 80M against the commoditization of hosted chat. Smart way to put up barriers to entry.
tangled_zans 11y ago
I've never used Slack, but people keep saying that it's good because of the apps. What sort of apps are those?
- drinchev 11y ago
  They are pretty much integrations. Access APIs of different platforms and manipulate / gather data.
beyondcompute 11y ago
Why not fix all the bugs that are there before lunching new products/features?
- mh- 11y ago
  that's a bit inflammatory to say; especially without offering a single example.
- DoofusOfDeath 11y ago
  Something that's in the middle between a bug and a missing feature (imho) is that Slack's failure to support Github-style markdown. GitHub does a great job with markdown, especially with programming-language-specific highlighting. And even things like strike-though text and URL's, which aren't specific to software development. It's one of the few aspects of Slack that has me open to alternative services.
cromwellian 11y ago
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 of artificial scarcity imposed by a non-open platform.
- stanleydrew 11y ago
  I upvoted, but I don't think I agree. There are lots of people building things on proprietary platforms all the time. Why single out FB and Slack? AWS is proprietary. Twilio is proprietary. It's not as if it's hard to find examples. And so what if some small team implements an auto responder bot and gets a couple hundred thousand in investment?
  - danmaz74 11y ago
    One difference is that with AWS you're the paying customer and have leverage. With FB or Slack, you're a non-paying "partner" and your leverage is almost null.
    - asmosoinio 11y ago
      But companies usually pay for Slack? You pretty much have to to get full history.
      - cromwellian 11y ago
        Consumers pay for iOS, but Apple still bans you from selling your app in the store. The gatekeeper function of the platform means they can shut you off at any time. If instead, Slack published a protocol so anyone could author a client, then bots would just be normal chat users, for the most part, on par with regular users, and a bot would simply be something you deploy somewhere to sit in your channels, just like IRC bots. I think Slack is a great app, very good UI, but I'm a little sick of proprietary messaging. We really don't need proprietary centralized messaging networks. Standardize a federated open protocol and let people compete on the clients and let the community agree on extensions to message payloads that clients pay attention to, or ignore.
nikon 11y ago
Wonder if their stack is still PHP/MySQL etc?[0] [0] https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/426469205005705217 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/426469205005705217
- creullin 11y ago
  Indeed they do https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/677237274770341888 https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/677237274770341888
chopete 11y ago
It is yammer all over again http://i.imgur.com/DKODqy3.png http://i.imgur.com/DKODqy3.png I can't help but post this based on my experience pitching to vendors to join an app store. Slack CEO: Yammer made $1.2B. We need to make $12B. For that I need to make a hit song with 10,000 background dancers with me on the stage. Board: How much can you pay each dancer?. CEO: $10/hr Board: Ok. Announce an App Store. You are already a hero and there are hundreds of them to jump on stage to dance with you in that 5 minute song. CEO: Now you are talking!
- Freak_NL 11y ago
  We were looking at a company communication channel to replace Yammer and Google Chat a while back, and briefly played with Slack. In the end trading in one cloud service for another seemed unwise. Because we already used self-hosted GitLab when they announced the inclusion of MatterMost (FOSS self-hosted alternative to Slack) we simply activated that and have been quite satisfied with it.
chuhnk 11y ago
I feel like the world has lost it's mind slightly. When a 2 year old startup launches an $80m fund. I mean I understand they want to be a platform and can see the strength in funding projects that will empower a platform model but still. This is the point at which I think we're really in a boom heading in that bubble direction, and I was never one to fall in to the trap of calling it a bubble before. Love slack, love the platform play, but my God this is getting crazy.
- TheAppGuy 11y ago
  As someone who has been through the hype and then crash of dotcoms in 2000, this does feel like a bubble.
- cowsandmilk 11y ago
  I think it is a useful way to double down on an investment. Rather than putting more money into the mothership, you bet on external tools that will help the mothership grow. It is also a way to reduce the costs of acquisition of the best integrations. If the majority of slack shareholders hold the majority of the shares in the best integration, it effectively lowers the price of acquisition to turn the tools built on slack into internal products/features.
  - jamiequint 11y ago
    This. $80m invested in a Slack ecosystem for these investors is likely to generate even more than that in returns (on their existing Slack equity) even if the investors never saw a dime out of the $80m invested.
- dsg42 11y ago
  Slack has an insane amount of money, and they don't need any of it. They've put massive amounts of cash in the bank to stay safe in a downturn, and are well on their way to profitability. They really DO have the cash to burn, and this is a great way to spend it on many fronts.
- tomasien 11y ago
  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 their strategy. Slack, which has very low burn, seems to have contributed to this fund but we can safely assume it was a small amount (if at all). This is a sign of strength. We're still creating transformational companies with real revenue models, and these companies often facilitate other great companies. Tech is strong - valuations may be wrong one way or another, but tech is a great place to deploy capital.
nubela 11y ago
Please guys, no. Don't build your startup on top of another platform. Remember Facebook? Remember Twitter? That 80M is a farce by the VCs that actually re-contributes back into Slack, not so much for you.
- tomasien 11y ago
  Agreed. Read my other comments on this thread and you'd think I'm a super Slack fan, but be wary - other people's platforms when they're this young are opportunities but you don't know what the next few years bring. ON THE OTHER HAND: Twitter and Facebook make money on ads, and that's what caused them to change course. Salesforce apps are still a huge business and that's closer to Twitter/FB than Slack.
- robryan 11y ago
  It depends, if having a slack integration will benefit your business and theirs and they are willing to help fund it, seems like a win win. Of course you are correct that you would never want to bet your business on their platform.
  - msoad 11y ago
    Until they are in your business also...
- cwyers 11y ago
  It's a risk of failure. There may be other benefits that outweigh that risk. I don't know why you'd make a general rule about that.
- alttab 11y ago
  People are going to get riled up about this statement since it is vague. Better to say: don't build a missing feature on top of a "platform." You will be consumed. Now, if there is "synergy" with that integration, then it makes sense, but this assumes you have a profitable standalone business to begin with. If your app is another way to poke people, you will lose. If your app was the first way to post pictures on twitter, you're screwed.
jaksmit 11y ago
Kind of funny for people to say that a new startup launching a fund means there's a bubble. That's exactly what Twilio have been doing even since 2010: https://gigaom.com/2010/09/23/got-a-twilio-based-app-get-some-investment-dollars/ https://gigaom.com/2010/09/23/got-a-twilio-based-app-get-som... http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/01/twilio-and-500-startups-launch-a-micro-fund-fund-for-european-startups/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/01/twilio-and-500-startups-lau... http://recode.net/2015/05/20/twilio-launches-50-million-development-fund/ http://recode.net/2015/05/20/twilio-launches-50-million-deve...
pkrumins 11y ago
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 embed a real interactive IE 10 on Win7 that runs your webapp at `URL` directly in Slack.
- el_benhameen 11y ago
  I would use this. And I'm going to check out browserling now, too. This looks really useful.
  - pkrumins 11y ago
    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 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.
- nithinr6 11y ago
  You can email them slackfund@slack.com
  - pkrumins 11y ago
    Awesome, thanks!
  - truediger10 11y ago
    Have you or anyone you know gotten a response? Do you know what exactly you should send them?
- 11y ago
anonfunction 11y ago
Really like the announcement of botkit[1], I was just looking at adding a vote bot to our slack and only found a really old example that ended up not working. 1. https://github.com/howdyai/botkit/ https://github.com/howdyai/botkit/
- sciurus 11y ago
  I hope that the official blessings of botkit doesn't negatively impact other bot frameworks that user the Slack APIs. Lita (https://www.lita.io/ https://www.lita.io/) is an excellent way to write Slack bots in Ruby. It supports other chat services and protocols too, so your bots don't lock you in to Slack.
  - Perceptes 11y ago
    Author of Lita here. Lita's Slack adapter isn't going anywhere. :}
- splatcollision 11y ago
  It's stupid easy to build bots with this...
ossreality 11y ago
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 second group that has some "great idea" who plans to build on Slack's platform. Personally, I look forward to 2 years of stories about how Slack was unfair to them, or changed the rules on them, or broke an API. Or didn't review fast enough, or any of the other complaints that pop up monthly about other closed platforms.
- TheLogothete 11y ago
  1) Take 300m in VC money. 2) VCs want their money back 3) Pull your hair for a a while. 4) Figure out a genius plan. Now you are an ecosystem! Nobody ever thought of that. You are a true silicon valley legend! 5) Profit Or not.
- tomasien 11y ago
  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.
  - jmspring 11y ago
    50% that's a stretch. Useful, yes, 1/2 of interactions, questionable.
    - jsmeaton 11y ago
      Parent didn't say 50% of interactions were integrations, just that the integrations are 50% of the reason people use Slack and I agree. There are other somewhat comparable products that are a lot cheaper, yet don't deliver the same value with regards to integrations.
    - tomasien 11y ago
abrkn 11y ago
Every program attempts to expand until it has an app store. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
- chadillac83 11y ago
  Abrkn's law was born.
  - mattdeboard 11y ago
    Brekken's Law (assuming that's his surname from the email in his profile). It's a snowclone of Zawinski's law of software development[1]: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. It really is true. My previous employer had a dream of turning their extremely specific web app into a platform, with an app store and everything. I assume that being a platform means big bucks, idk. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_law_of_software_envelopment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_la...
    - isolate 11y ago
      It's a snarky observation that hides an important insight: email is the most important thing that the internet does.
- Spivak 11y ago
  Wouldn't the general form of this be every program expands until it implements a plug-in system?
- Matthias247 11y ago
  Don't think that's necessarily true. Yes, lots of programs implement app stores or plugin systems. But often the users also don't want to fiddle with add-ons, their installation and settings. They want a good and well-integrated out-of-the box experience. Especially if they are not from the tech domain. E.g. let's look at Eclipse: It was based purely on AddOns right from the beginning. And still many people want to replace it with other things (probably without AddOns).
bhuga 11y ago
Does anyone know if this comes with an initiative to fill in the gaps in Slack's administrative API so addons can be created around that, too? I'm working with SlimerJS to audit message retention and a few other settings. Slack has a great core experience and I understand why it's doing so well. But it's weird to see an $80m fund to invest particularly in Slack addons when a lot of existing features don't yet have API support.
fideloper 11y ago
2 points: 1. Remember when Dropbox was dumb, because rsync? (Bunch of naysayers here citing fee alternatives). From what I'm seeing, bots and integrations are great and here to stay. Businesses will gladly pay money in exchange for time and complexity not spent rolling your own. 2. This seems like a boon for us happy slack users!
- chlestakoff 11y ago
  Will somebody please explain the use cases for slack bots to me? If they are basically glorified command line scripts, the I get it. But are there genuine and important use cases that require/can benefit from a richer dialogue?
  - spdustin 11y ago
    I use bots to make it easier for non technical personnel to perform complex operations, and also to provide some rooms with extra context. For example, if someone mentions "HS 201" in chat, our bot responds with a link and summary of HelpScoit conversation #201. If it's [A-Z]{3}-\d{1,4}, he replies with a link and summary info for a Jira issue.
  - jzelinskie 11y ago
    There's a pretty good talk on "chatops" by the guys at GitHub[0]. Basically, it provides a dialog around a "shared command-line" where developers from learn from each other by simply watching chat. I think it's more beneficial to distributed companies. However, my question for those using chatops is basically how do you keep the repository for the bot "tame"? It needs access to _everything_ if you want it to be useful, which means having lots of secrets exposed to the bot. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NST3u-GjjFw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NST3u-GjjFw
    - lotyrin 11y ago
      Give the bot runtime (not in the repository, environment variable or something) credentials for a secret storage tool of some kind, where it can then fetch credentials for whatever it's allowed to do.
adamseabrook 11y ago
No need to build your entire startup on Slack but a solid integration can drive serious initial revenue for your startup especially if you do not get a lot of direct traffic. "One click install" is what helped Woocommerce and others get massive growth on the back of Wordpress through top exposure in the plugin directory. Slack is still very much at the bottom of the growth curve. I have seen electrical contractors who need a way to chat with onsite workers at various projects switch from using WhatsApp/SMS to Slack. If one click job scheduling apps start appearing in the Slack App Store they will be quickly adopted by these businesses. I would be surprised if Slack or something like it has not completely wiped out internal email in 5 years.
- Nowyouknow 11y ago
  I'm sure I can accomplish this with a simple Google search (and I'm going to do that next) but I do want to put a request out there. I'd love to see some use cases of successful, complex Slack integrations and how the organization has saved time/money by making Slack a part of their workflow. It seems to be a tool built for developers, at least I see a lot advocates that are developers. I want to know how personnel across multiple departments feel about using the tool.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- gkop 11y ago
  I too am bullish on Slack and am with you right until "wiped out email." I've heard this said about Slack before and don't get it. Asana is a real email killer in that it's both realtime (instant) and structured (i.e. it wholly replaces email threads). On a meta level, why is it that it's so important for Slack's marketing that they "replace email"? Why isn't it enough for them to "go beyond email" (which is totally realistic and honest and still a potentially huge business)?
  - stanleydrew 11y ago
    I don't know whether it's important for Slack's marketing to claim they are replacing email. What I can tell you is that it factually has wiped out internal email for our team at Charge. And I think that's pretty common for most teams that have used it. Why write a slow clunky old email when a Slack message will do?
mark_l_watson 11y ago
I used Slack for a few months this year. A customer didn't use email, preferring Slack. Slack is an awesome platform, but I missed the asynchrony of email. When I code I like to have 30 to 40 minute uninterrupted work periods and I found an always on Slack took me out of the flow. Using Slack with specified "turn it off" quiet times would solve that issue however.
- gkop 11y ago
  Just keep it open in a tab of the same browser window where you check HN ;) (and don't enable the desktop notifications, of course)
hayksaakian 11y ago
Can someone who uses slack comment on the value over skype for example? It seems like text chat is hard to get wrong, and with so many options, I wonder why (real) people choose slack specifically.
- bossx 11y ago
  In the 90s Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was extremely popular, you connect to a public server, and join a #channel and chat with people, send files, share links etc. There were thousands of ways to extend IRC, through custom clients, bots, scripts. Slack builds upon a lot of core concepts that IRC had but differs in a few ways. 1) Simplicity, you can get up and running in a few minutes and have your whole team connected. 2) Managed hosting, maintenance and client updates 3) Excellent UX, features are intuitive and new features are introduced with guidance 4) Cross platform support and fast mobile clients 5) Integrations, being able to push and pull data across you apps from the place your entire team can communicate is incredibly powerful. The discoverability and ease of deployment (some can be deployed in a few minutes). I think they have a great position in the SMB market. Surprisingly some enterprise organizations still use IRC internally due to the control they have over server/data etc. There is probably an opportunity for Slack to develop an on-premise solution for enterprise.
  - distances 11y ago
    I was a bit hesitant first when our company first started using Flowdock (a Slack competitor), but it turned out to be just great. For example: flows (or chat rooms) with inbox for integrations to e-mail, GitHub, CI and so on -- discussion can be directly related to a certain item, such as a failed build! And of course, discussion threads. This is something Slack still doesn't have, and is a one of the reasons to stay with Flowdock instead. Everyone knows what happens with IRC channels when there's hundreds of people and multiple simultaneous discussions. Good luck trying to follow the conversation if you weren't following it realtime. That said, it sadly seems that Slack will eat the whole pie, and it is probably the most future-proof choice at the moment.
- mkching 11y ago
  I use Slack in my own company, but often use Skype with companies that I do contract work for. Searching your conversation history in Skype is terrible. Slack really does this well.
altonzheng 11y ago
Slack is great and all, but I personally don't feel like it's revolutionary. It's just an iterative improvement over a chat client, nothing groundbreaking there.
- cookiecaper 11y ago
  As in most other popular things, there's little actual substance undergirding Slack. Slack lives off hot air. Lucky for them, I suppose.
adoming3 11y ago
The fund is a great play for Slack to become the next enterprise app store. A welcome alternate to the Salesforce AppExchange IMO.
- vessenes 11y ago
  Interesting idea. I love the thought of integrating everything over to a text chat interface as opposed to salesforce's godawful web UI. I really like! I'm imagining, say accounting integrations which are cryptographically signed by the accounting software and go into a channel. I bet I'll be paying for an enterprise inside-the-firewall version of slack in the next few years, or wrestling with some competitor that's not quite as good, one way or the other.
thatindiandude 11y ago
I don't think it's reasonable to say we're in a bubble because of a $80M fund around developing for a new platform. Few companies truly become platforms, and it's a misnomer to call it a bubble if this only happens to one company. It takes a lot of money or momentum to develop one. Facebook had by far the most compelling one in the last ten years, and the obvious incentive there was it's >300M users at the time. The case is less compelling for a B2B platform like Slack, but it makes sense as many of these investors also invest in B2B startups that can gain huge visibility through the Slack platform. By having six investors in the fund, each fund can mitigate risk of Slack's platform not getting traction while lowering the barrier for developers to enter. This slideshow by A16Z outlines why the venture capitalists (including some on the list of Slack fund contributors) are tightening their belts around investing and telling companies like Slack to generate reliable business models rather than IPO prematurely. This premature IPO behavior was the reason for the last bubble, and I think this investment fund is proof that we are NOT in a bubble. The new strategy for these investment funds is to allow their startups to generate revenue on a much more stable basis without the need to go public (and get cash for equity) for this to happen. Most B2B companies would eventually benefit from a recurring-fees model built around the Slack platform, and this enables smaller, fledging companies to scale much more quickly towards long-term cashflow positivity. In all, the kings of tech companies are those that find some sort of platform or natural monopoly. Slack may be next in line to follow Airbnb, Uber, Twitter, Facebook, and Google respectively. Overall, by allowing a method to build these platforms while not going public, investors increase returns for their companies in the short AND LONG term while maintaining a course of innovation!
- btown 11y ago
  A good comparison that hasn't been mentioned much in this thread is Salesforce's Salesforce1 Fund, which launched with $100M in 2014 to encourage people to build around the B2B app-creation platform it had launched a year earlier [0]. As the parent post mentions, it's important to make the case "compelling" for building best-in-class integrations with a relatively-recently-launched platform (whether or not that platform is sponsored by a historically huge corporation or not). It's an interesting point that bringing multiple sources of external capital to bear on an ecosystem via a multi-sponsor fund, rather than into the business itself via an IPO, allows the business to grow at a natural rate, and avoids Slack contributing to a "bubble" in which companies race to go public to launch their own platforms. I think we've learned from the last time around that the public markets aren't the best place to manage expectations in technology. As for why the sponsors made this investment, there's a very good case to be made that (a) efficient free-form communication within agile teams at small and large companies is a pattern as crucial to developing modern businesses as a CRM, and (b) Slack is perfectly poised to capture and hold this new market in the same way that Salesforce was. Certainly worth a $13mm commitment that's diversified amongst companies whose teams could still pivot should Slack not work out. [0] https://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases/2014/09/140908.jsp https://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases...
JohnDoe365 11y ago
I definitely witter a new IT bubble
martin-adams 11y ago
So if I build something on top of this that actually turns out to be popular and turns a good profit, what is to protect me from Slack then building it in the core product that cutting me out or shutting me down? Not much I guess. Twitpic anyone? [1]. 1. https://blog.twitpic.com/2014/09/twitpic-is-shutting-down/ https://blog.twitpic.com/2014/09/twitpic-is-shutting-down/
mikemockup 11y ago
Nice move by Slack and great opportunity for slackbot developers. We discover zero interfaces and just launched analytics bot – http://www.brobot.io http://www.brobot.io You can use it with Google Analytics, Mixpanel, New Relic.
jim-greer 11y ago
In this thread: a lot of people who haven't used Slack attacking it...
ihuman 11y ago
How does BotKit compare to slack-client[1]? [1] https://github.com/slackhq/node-slack-client https://github.com/slackhq/node-slack-client
brightball 11y ago
I summarize Slack this way generally: - If you've never used Hipchat, Slack is completely revolutionary. - If you've used Hipchat, Slack is still cool...and then you see the price comparison and ponder...WHY?
- tootie 11y ago
  My company has both! Why buy one when you have two for twice the price!
asbromberg 11y ago
Interesting, could this be the beginning of something like WeChat for businesses, where every business function you think of can just be completed on Slack? I doubt there's anything about the U.S. market that makes these non-open / corporation controlled platforms undesirable (as some other comments suggest); after all, Windows dominates the business landscape. Its just a question of whether Slack can go from convincing start ups x,y and z to use these apps, to convincing Fortune 500 companies to take the plunge.
thallukrish 11y ago
I feel an App ecosystem definitely helps to expand the functions. However I also feel it is opposite of a nimble app which does one thing clean. In general we have always had this conflict and it is difficult to choose to stay lean and simple especially when you decide to grow and scale to engulf everything. Its almost like 'Let me grab as much as I can before some one comes' sort of thinking. Only the market can prove if this is the right thinking in the long run. But when you see it in the short span, you do not have much choice.
dblock 11y ago
Slack team did a great job with this. Here's a fresh integration with Slack Button in Ruby, https://github.com/dblock/slack-bot-server https://github.com/dblock/slack-bot-server serving a "Hello World" bot. Hope it helps someone.
viach 11y ago
Looks like SHOW HN will be crowded more than often after this weekend.
djhn 11y ago
Evernote had a developer conference. They wanted an ecosystem, and kind of had a platform. They bought sucessful apps. Past tense! Much better/realistic parallel, than Facebook F8.

366 points by thejosh 11y ago

Their dev blog post [0] mentions an AWS Lambda Blueprint to go along with a chatbot framework (BotKit) and an "Add to Slack" workflow. This (AWS Lambda) is a smart move; it reduces the friction of writing a quick integration with Slack considerably, making it almost a commodity-level feature. This bet on AWS Lambda will likely be a big deal for general AWS Lambda adoption, given how insanely popular Slack integrations are. [0]: https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/launch-platform-114754258b91#.jp25qhvsl https://medium.com/slack-developer-blog/launch-platform-1147...

kriro 11y ago

I've never used slack and don't know what types of apps they want to integrate but it seems like a disruption of a nice chunk of a market that ERP vendors have ventured into (the job productivity/project management etc. branch). That sounds good because quite frankly often the stuff ERP vendors offer in that space is somewhat lackluster "well we have to be in this area" material. I think the slack platform could eventually branch out into more traditional ERP areas (accounting, production etc.) and it could be an interesting potential shift from "everything from one hand" to "let's configure our ERP from different services" Building a platform like this is nontrivial and there's tons of problems ahead but I like the general idea.

BrainInAJar 11y ago

Christ, they just don't get it... What we need isn't "apps for Slack" what we need is onprem Slack. Because sending confidential information to "the cloud" is all kinds of stupid and potentially violates a bunch of laws

morbidkk 11y ago
folks at atlassian (hipchat) are already doing this...it depends which markets one pursuing...slack and hipchat are totally on different scale. Atlassian even didn't make hipchat user numbers public during IPO proceedings

raymondgh 11y ago

That's 80M against the commoditization of hosted chat. Smart way to put up barriers to entry.

tangled_zans 11y ago

I've never used Slack, but people keep saying that it's good because of the apps. What sort of apps are those?

drinchev 11y ago
They are pretty much integrations. Access APIs of different platforms and manipulate / gather data.

beyondcompute 11y ago

Why not fix all the bugs that are there before lunching new products/features?

mh- 11y ago
that's a bit inflammatory to say; especially without offering a single example.
DoofusOfDeath 11y ago
Something that's in the middle between a bug and a missing feature (imho) is that Slack's failure to support Github-style markdown. GitHub does a great job with markdown, especially with programming-language-specific highlighting. And even things like strike-though text and URL's, which aren't specific to software development. It's one of the few aspects of Slack that has me open to alternative services.

cromwellian 11y ago

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 of artificial scarcity imposed by a non-open platform.

stanleydrew 11y ago
I upvoted, but I don't think I agree. There are lots of people building things on proprietary platforms all the time. Why single out FB and Slack? AWS is proprietary. Twilio is proprietary. It's not as if it's hard to find examples. And so what if some small team implements an auto responder bot and gets a couple hundred thousand in investment?
- danmaz74 11y ago
  One difference is that with AWS you're the paying customer and have leverage. With FB or Slack, you're a non-paying "partner" and your leverage is almost null.
  - asmosoinio 11y ago
    But companies usually pay for Slack? You pretty much have to to get full history.
    - cromwellian 11y ago
      Consumers pay for iOS, but Apple still bans you from selling your app in the store. The gatekeeper function of the platform means they can shut you off at any time. If instead, Slack published a protocol so anyone could author a client, then bots would just be normal chat users, for the most part, on par with regular users, and a bot would simply be something you deploy somewhere to sit in your channels, just like IRC bots. I think Slack is a great app, very good UI, but I'm a little sick of proprietary messaging. We really don't need proprietary centralized messaging networks. Standardize a federated open protocol and let people compete on the clients and let the community agree on extensions to message payloads that clients pay attention to, or ignore.

nikon 11y ago

Wonder if their stack is still PHP/MySQL etc?[0] [0] https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/426469205005705217 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/426469205005705217

creullin 11y ago
Indeed they do https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/677237274770341888 https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/677237274770341888

chopete 11y ago

It is yammer all over again http://i.imgur.com/DKODqy3.png http://i.imgur.com/DKODqy3.png I can't help but post this based on my experience pitching to vendors to join an app store. Slack CEO: Yammer made $1.2B. We need to make $12B. For that I need to make a hit song with 10,000 background dancers with me on the stage. Board: How much can you pay each dancer?. CEO: $10/hr Board: Ok. Announce an App Store. You are already a hero and there are hundreds of them to jump on stage to dance with you in that 5 minute song. CEO: Now you are talking!

Freak_NL 11y ago
We were looking at a company communication channel to replace Yammer and Google Chat a while back, and briefly played with Slack. In the end trading in one cloud service for another seemed unwise. Because we already used self-hosted GitLab when they announced the inclusion of MatterMost (FOSS self-hosted alternative to Slack) we simply activated that and have been quite satisfied with it.

chuhnk 11y ago

I feel like the world has lost it's mind slightly. When a 2 year old startup launches an $80m fund. I mean I understand they want to be a platform and can see the strength in funding projects that will empower a platform model but still. This is the point at which I think we're really in a boom heading in that bubble direction, and I was never one to fall in to the trap of calling it a bubble before. Love slack, love the platform play, but my God this is getting crazy.

TheAppGuy 11y ago
As someone who has been through the hype and then crash of dotcoms in 2000, this does feel like a bubble.
cowsandmilk 11y ago
I think it is a useful way to double down on an investment. Rather than putting more money into the mothership, you bet on external tools that will help the mothership grow. It is also a way to reduce the costs of acquisition of the best integrations. If the majority of slack shareholders hold the majority of the shares in the best integration, it effectively lowers the price of acquisition to turn the tools built on slack into internal products/features.
- jamiequint 11y ago
  This. $80m invested in a Slack ecosystem for these investors is likely to generate even more than that in returns (on their existing Slack equity) even if the investors never saw a dime out of the $80m invested.
dsg42 11y ago
Slack has an insane amount of money, and they don't need any of it. They've put massive amounts of cash in the bank to stay safe in a downturn, and are well on their way to profitability. They really DO have the cash to burn, and this is a great way to spend it on many fronts.
tomasien 11y ago
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 their strategy. Slack, which has very low burn, seems to have contributed to this fund but we can safely assume it was a small amount (if at all). This is a sign of strength. We're still creating transformational companies with real revenue models, and these companies often facilitate other great companies. Tech is strong - valuations may be wrong one way or another, but tech is a great place to deploy capital.

nubela 11y ago

Please guys, no. Don't build your startup on top of another platform. Remember Facebook? Remember Twitter? That 80M is a farce by the VCs that actually re-contributes back into Slack, not so much for you.

tomasien 11y ago
Agreed. Read my other comments on this thread and you'd think I'm a super Slack fan, but be wary - other people's platforms when they're this young are opportunities but you don't know what the next few years bring. ON THE OTHER HAND: Twitter and Facebook make money on ads, and that's what caused them to change course. Salesforce apps are still a huge business and that's closer to Twitter/FB than Slack.
robryan 11y ago
It depends, if having a slack integration will benefit your business and theirs and they are willing to help fund it, seems like a win win. Of course you are correct that you would never want to bet your business on their platform.
- msoad 11y ago
  Until they are in your business also...
cwyers 11y ago
It's a risk of failure. There may be other benefits that outweigh that risk. I don't know why you'd make a general rule about that.
alttab 11y ago
People are going to get riled up about this statement since it is vague. Better to say: don't build a missing feature on top of a "platform." You will be consumed. Now, if there is "synergy" with that integration, then it makes sense, but this assumes you have a profitable standalone business to begin with. If your app is another way to poke people, you will lose. If your app was the first way to post pictures on twitter, you're screwed.

jaksmit 11y ago

Kind of funny for people to say that a new startup launching a fund means there's a bubble. That's exactly what Twilio have been doing even since 2010: https://gigaom.com/2010/09/23/got-a-twilio-based-app-get-some-investment-dollars/ https://gigaom.com/2010/09/23/got-a-twilio-based-app-get-som... http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/01/twilio-and-500-startups-launch-a-micro-fund-fund-for-european-startups/ http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/01/twilio-and-500-startups-lau... http://recode.net/2015/05/20/twilio-launches-50-million-development-fund/ http://recode.net/2015/05/20/twilio-launches-50-million-deve...

pkrumins 11y ago

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 embed a real interactive IE 10 on Win7 that runs your webapp at `URL` directly in Slack.

el_benhameen 11y ago
I would use this. And I'm going to check out browserling now, too. This looks really useful.
- pkrumins 11y ago
  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 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.
nithinr6 11y ago
You can email them slackfund@slack.com
- pkrumins 11y ago
  Awesome, thanks!
- truediger10 11y ago
  Have you or anyone you know gotten a response? Do you know what exactly you should send them?
11y ago

anonfunction 11y ago

Really like the announcement of botkit[1], I was just looking at adding a vote bot to our slack and only found a really old example that ended up not working. 1. https://github.com/howdyai/botkit/ https://github.com/howdyai/botkit/

sciurus 11y ago
I hope that the official blessings of botkit doesn't negatively impact other bot frameworks that user the Slack APIs. Lita (https://www.lita.io/ https://www.lita.io/) is an excellent way to write Slack bots in Ruby. It supports other chat services and protocols too, so your bots don't lock you in to Slack.
- Perceptes 11y ago
  Author of Lita here. Lita's Slack adapter isn't going anywhere. :}
splatcollision 11y ago
It's stupid easy to build bots with this...

ossreality 11y ago

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 second group that has some "great idea" who plans to build on Slack's platform. Personally, I look forward to 2 years of stories about how Slack was unfair to them, or changed the rules on them, or broke an API. Or didn't review fast enough, or any of the other complaints that pop up monthly about other closed platforms.

TheLogothete 11y ago
1) Take 300m in VC money. 2) VCs want their money back 3) Pull your hair for a a while. 4) Figure out a genius plan. Now you are an ecosystem! Nobody ever thought of that. You are a true silicon valley legend! 5) Profit Or not.
tomasien 11y ago
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.
- jmspring 11y ago
  50% that's a stretch. Useful, yes, 1/2 of interactions, questionable.
  - jsmeaton 11y ago
    Parent didn't say 50% of interactions were integrations, just that the integrations are 50% of the reason people use Slack and I agree. There are other somewhat comparable products that are a lot cheaper, yet don't deliver the same value with regards to integrations.
  - tomasien 11y ago

abrkn 11y ago

Every program attempts to expand until it has an app store. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

chadillac83 11y ago
Abrkn's law was born.
- mattdeboard 11y ago
  Brekken's Law (assuming that's his surname from the email in his profile). It's a snowclone of Zawinski's law of software development[1]: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. It really is true. My previous employer had a dream of turning their extremely specific web app into a platform, with an app store and everything. I assume that being a platform means big bucks, idk. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_law_of_software_envelopment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski.27s_la...
  - isolate 11y ago
    It's a snarky observation that hides an important insight: email is the most important thing that the internet does.
Spivak 11y ago
Wouldn't the general form of this be every program expands until it implements a plug-in system?
Matthias247 11y ago
Don't think that's necessarily true. Yes, lots of programs implement app stores or plugin systems. But often the users also don't want to fiddle with add-ons, their installation and settings. They want a good and well-integrated out-of-the box experience. Especially if they are not from the tech domain. E.g. let's look at Eclipse: It was based purely on AddOns right from the beginning. And still many people want to replace it with other things (probably without AddOns).

bhuga 11y ago

Does anyone know if this comes with an initiative to fill in the gaps in Slack's administrative API so addons can be created around that, too? I'm working with SlimerJS to audit message retention and a few other settings. Slack has a great core experience and I understand why it's doing so well. But it's weird to see an $80m fund to invest particularly in Slack addons when a lot of existing features don't yet have API support.

fideloper 11y ago

2 points: 1. Remember when Dropbox was dumb, because rsync? (Bunch of naysayers here citing fee alternatives). From what I'm seeing, bots and integrations are great and here to stay. Businesses will gladly pay money in exchange for time and complexity not spent rolling your own. 2. This seems like a boon for us happy slack users!

chlestakoff 11y ago
Will somebody please explain the use cases for slack bots to me? If they are basically glorified command line scripts, the I get it. But are there genuine and important use cases that require/can benefit from a richer dialogue?
- spdustin 11y ago
  I use bots to make it easier for non technical personnel to perform complex operations, and also to provide some rooms with extra context. For example, if someone mentions "HS 201" in chat, our bot responds with a link and summary of HelpScoit conversation #201. If it's [A-Z]{3}-\d{1,4}, he replies with a link and summary info for a Jira issue.
- jzelinskie 11y ago
  There's a pretty good talk on "chatops" by the guys at GitHub[0]. Basically, it provides a dialog around a "shared command-line" where developers from learn from each other by simply watching chat. I think it's more beneficial to distributed companies. However, my question for those using chatops is basically how do you keep the repository for the bot "tame"? It needs access to _everything_ if you want it to be useful, which means having lots of secrets exposed to the bot. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NST3u-GjjFw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NST3u-GjjFw
  - lotyrin 11y ago
    Give the bot runtime (not in the repository, environment variable or something) credentials for a secret storage tool of some kind, where it can then fetch credentials for whatever it's allowed to do.

adamseabrook 11y ago

No need to build your entire startup on Slack but a solid integration can drive serious initial revenue for your startup especially if you do not get a lot of direct traffic. "One click install" is what helped Woocommerce and others get massive growth on the back of Wordpress through top exposure in the plugin directory. Slack is still very much at the bottom of the growth curve. I have seen electrical contractors who need a way to chat with onsite workers at various projects switch from using WhatsApp/SMS to Slack. If one click job scheduling apps start appearing in the Slack App Store they will be quickly adopted by these businesses. I would be surprised if Slack or something like it has not completely wiped out internal email in 5 years.

Nowyouknow 11y ago
I'm sure I can accomplish this with a simple Google search (and I'm going to do that next) but I do want to put a request out there. I'd love to see some use cases of successful, complex Slack integrations and how the organization has saved time/money by making Slack a part of their workflow. It seems to be a tool built for developers, at least I see a lot advocates that are developers. I want to know how personnel across multiple departments feel about using the tool.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
gkop 11y ago
I too am bullish on Slack and am with you right until "wiped out email." I've heard this said about Slack before and don't get it. Asana is a real email killer in that it's both realtime (instant) and structured (i.e. it wholly replaces email threads). On a meta level, why is it that it's so important for Slack's marketing that they "replace email"? Why isn't it enough for them to "go beyond email" (which is totally realistic and honest and still a potentially huge business)?
- stanleydrew 11y ago
  I don't know whether it's important for Slack's marketing to claim they are replacing email. What I can tell you is that it factually has wiped out internal email for our team at Charge. And I think that's pretty common for most teams that have used it. Why write a slow clunky old email when a Slack message will do?

mark_l_watson 11y ago

I used Slack for a few months this year. A customer didn't use email, preferring Slack. Slack is an awesome platform, but I missed the asynchrony of email. When I code I like to have 30 to 40 minute uninterrupted work periods and I found an always on Slack took me out of the flow. Using Slack with specified "turn it off" quiet times would solve that issue however.

gkop 11y ago
Just keep it open in a tab of the same browser window where you check HN ;) (and don't enable the desktop notifications, of course)

hayksaakian 11y ago

Can someone who uses slack comment on the value over skype for example? It seems like text chat is hard to get wrong, and with so many options, I wonder why (real) people choose slack specifically.

bossx 11y ago
In the 90s Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was extremely popular, you connect to a public server, and join a #channel and chat with people, send files, share links etc. There were thousands of ways to extend IRC, through custom clients, bots, scripts. Slack builds upon a lot of core concepts that IRC had but differs in a few ways. 1) Simplicity, you can get up and running in a few minutes and have your whole team connected. 2) Managed hosting, maintenance and client updates 3) Excellent UX, features are intuitive and new features are introduced with guidance 4) Cross platform support and fast mobile clients 5) Integrations, being able to push and pull data across you apps from the place your entire team can communicate is incredibly powerful. The discoverability and ease of deployment (some can be deployed in a few minutes). I think they have a great position in the SMB market. Surprisingly some enterprise organizations still use IRC internally due to the control they have over server/data etc. There is probably an opportunity for Slack to develop an on-premise solution for enterprise.
- distances 11y ago
  I was a bit hesitant first when our company first started using Flowdock (a Slack competitor), but it turned out to be just great. For example: flows (or chat rooms) with inbox for integrations to e-mail, GitHub, CI and so on -- discussion can be directly related to a certain item, such as a failed build! And of course, discussion threads. This is something Slack still doesn't have, and is a one of the reasons to stay with Flowdock instead. Everyone knows what happens with IRC channels when there's hundreds of people and multiple simultaneous discussions. Good luck trying to follow the conversation if you weren't following it realtime. That said, it sadly seems that Slack will eat the whole pie, and it is probably the most future-proof choice at the moment.
mkching 11y ago
I use Slack in my own company, but often use Skype with companies that I do contract work for. Searching your conversation history in Skype is terrible. Slack really does this well.

altonzheng 11y ago

Slack is great and all, but I personally don't feel like it's revolutionary. It's just an iterative improvement over a chat client, nothing groundbreaking there.

cookiecaper 11y ago
As in most other popular things, there's little actual substance undergirding Slack. Slack lives off hot air. Lucky for them, I suppose.

adoming3 11y ago

The fund is a great play for Slack to become the next enterprise app store. A welcome alternate to the Salesforce AppExchange IMO.

vessenes 11y ago
Interesting idea. I love the thought of integrating everything over to a text chat interface as opposed to salesforce's godawful web UI. I really like! I'm imagining, say accounting integrations which are cryptographically signed by the accounting software and go into a channel. I bet I'll be paying for an enterprise inside-the-firewall version of slack in the next few years, or wrestling with some competitor that's not quite as good, one way or the other.

thatindiandude 11y ago

I don't think it's reasonable to say we're in a bubble because of a $80M fund around developing for a new platform. Few companies truly become platforms, and it's a misnomer to call it a bubble if this only happens to one company. It takes a lot of money or momentum to develop one. Facebook had by far the most compelling one in the last ten years, and the obvious incentive there was it's >300M users at the time. The case is less compelling for a B2B platform like Slack, but it makes sense as many of these investors also invest in B2B startups that can gain huge visibility through the Slack platform. By having six investors in the fund, each fund can mitigate risk of Slack's platform not getting traction while lowering the barrier for developers to enter. This slideshow by A16Z outlines why the venture capitalists (including some on the list of Slack fund contributors) are tightening their belts around investing and telling companies like Slack to generate reliable business models rather than IPO prematurely. This premature IPO behavior was the reason for the last bubble, and I think this investment fund is proof that we are NOT in a bubble. The new strategy for these investment funds is to allow their startups to generate revenue on a much more stable basis without the need to go public (and get cash for equity) for this to happen. Most B2B companies would eventually benefit from a recurring-fees model built around the Slack platform, and this enables smaller, fledging companies to scale much more quickly towards long-term cashflow positivity. In all, the kings of tech companies are those that find some sort of platform or natural monopoly. Slack may be next in line to follow Airbnb, Uber, Twitter, Facebook, and Google respectively. Overall, by allowing a method to build these platforms while not going public, investors increase returns for their companies in the short AND LONG term while maintaining a course of innovation!

btown 11y ago
A good comparison that hasn't been mentioned much in this thread is Salesforce's Salesforce1 Fund, which launched with $100M in 2014 to encourage people to build around the B2B app-creation platform it had launched a year earlier [0]. As the parent post mentions, it's important to make the case "compelling" for building best-in-class integrations with a relatively-recently-launched platform (whether or not that platform is sponsored by a historically huge corporation or not). It's an interesting point that bringing multiple sources of external capital to bear on an ecosystem via a multi-sponsor fund, rather than into the business itself via an IPO, allows the business to grow at a natural rate, and avoids Slack contributing to a "bubble" in which companies race to go public to launch their own platforms. I think we've learned from the last time around that the public markets aren't the best place to manage expectations in technology. As for why the sponsors made this investment, there's a very good case to be made that (a) efficient free-form communication within agile teams at small and large companies is a pattern as crucial to developing modern businesses as a CRM, and (b) Slack is perfectly poised to capture and hold this new market in the same way that Salesforce was. Certainly worth a $13mm commitment that's diversified amongst companies whose teams could still pivot should Slack not work out. [0] https://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases/2014/09/140908.jsp https://www.salesforce.com/company/news-press/press-releases...

JohnDoe365 11y ago

I definitely witter a new IT bubble

martin-adams 11y ago

So if I build something on top of this that actually turns out to be popular and turns a good profit, what is to protect me from Slack then building it in the core product that cutting me out or shutting me down? Not much I guess. Twitpic anyone? [1]. 1. https://blog.twitpic.com/2014/09/twitpic-is-shutting-down/ https://blog.twitpic.com/2014/09/twitpic-is-shutting-down/

mikemockup 11y ago

Nice move by Slack and great opportunity for slackbot developers. We discover zero interfaces and just launched analytics bot – http://www.brobot.io http://www.brobot.io You can use it with Google Analytics, Mixpanel, New Relic.

jim-greer 11y ago

In this thread: a lot of people who haven't used Slack attacking it...

ihuman 11y ago

How does BotKit compare to slack-client[1]? [1] https://github.com/slackhq/node-slack-client https://github.com/slackhq/node-slack-client

brightball 11y ago

I summarize Slack this way generally: - If you've never used Hipchat, Slack is completely revolutionary. - If you've used Hipchat, Slack is still cool...and then you see the price comparison and ponder...WHY?

tootie 11y ago
My company has both! Why buy one when you have two for twice the price!

asbromberg 11y ago

Interesting, could this be the beginning of something like WeChat for businesses, where every business function you think of can just be completed on Slack? I doubt there's anything about the U.S. market that makes these non-open / corporation controlled platforms undesirable (as some other comments suggest); after all, Windows dominates the business landscape. Its just a question of whether Slack can go from convincing start ups x,y and z to use these apps, to convincing Fortune 500 companies to take the plunge.

thallukrish 11y ago

I feel an App ecosystem definitely helps to expand the functions. However I also feel it is opposite of a nimble app which does one thing clean. In general we have always had this conflict and it is difficult to choose to stay lean and simple especially when you decide to grow and scale to engulf everything. Its almost like 'Let me grab as much as I can before some one comes' sort of thinking. Only the market can prove if this is the right thinking in the long run. But when you see it in the short span, you do not have much choice.

dblock 11y ago

Slack team did a great job with this. Here's a fresh integration with Slack Button in Ruby, https://github.com/dblock/slack-bot-server https://github.com/dblock/slack-bot-server serving a "Hello World" bot. Hope it helps someone.

viach 11y ago

Looks like SHOW HN will be crowded more than often after this weekend.

djhn 11y ago

Evernote had a developer conference. They wanted an ecosystem, and kind of had a platform. They bought sucessful apps. Past tense! Much better/realistic parallel, than Facebook F8.