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How we use Slack in our family
- stephenitis 11y agoAre there any downsides to using slack for family uses? I can only of think of my personal need to separate work/personal chat apps
- fjallstrom 11y agothe apps support several teams, you're set to go
- filipm 11y agoI think the MatHem hack is pretty neat, why would anyone be offended by it?
- charlieegan3 11y agoWe also use slack in our family - haven't customised anything other than adding an emoji for the dog. I've found slack channels to work well with different sections of the extended family.
- realusername 11y agoI also wanted to setup something like this but I did not see an option to switch languages in Slack and since no-one speaks any English, it's not going to work well...
- spinningarrow 11y agoIf you're writing your own Slackbot it shouldn't matter, should it?
- realusername 11y agoThe interface of Slack is still in English which is a major blocker for me.
- vlunkr 11y agoLooks like you're right: https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/215058658-Using-Slack-in-different-languages https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/215058658-Using-Sla.... That's surprising to me.
- spinningarrow 11y ago> Our school is living in the future, providing a RSS-feed per child. That is actually really cool. Are there any privacy concerns though?
- fjallstrom 11y agohi. article author here. the feed url is very long, and parents can disable it entirely. so i guess it's fine.
- pc86 11y ago> the feed url is very long What does this have to do with the security of the feed?
- s9ix 11y agohttp://security.stackexchange.com/questions/36870/is-including-a-secret-guid-in-an-url-security-through-obscurity http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/36870/is-includi...
- overcast 11y agoI'm getting the fear.
- emergentcypher 11y agoPut another way: all security is security through obscurity. Whether we're guessing URLs or brute-forcing passwords, logging HTTP traffic or keylogging someone's machine. I hardly see the difference. It's not easy to tell where "obscurity" ends and "security" begins.
- jedberg 11y agoObscurity is when the secret part is entirely based on one side of the transaction (I hope they don't find this URL) whereas security involves secrets on both sides that must be discovered (here is a key exchange where we both know a secret thing).
- birbal 11y agothis is so awesome. My wife and I have been thinking and working on how can family productivity be improved. It's not an easy task as we are figuring out. There was a recent blog post that became reasonably popular. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-slack-moms-slackformoms-kavalpreet-ganti https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/where-slack-moms-slackformoms... The challenge I feel is to determine if one should take a broad-based approach to family productivity that addresses all aspects or should one take a narrow high-value problem and solve for improving the productivity of that task. We have approached it from the point of view of making kids' activity planning as a task easier. We are going into beta in a week or so. We'll know if this works.
- ritonlajoie 11y agoNice use of slack. Side question : anybody here using some sort of hosted family social network ? I'm thinking about doing that. We have a huge family (around 200 alive members who are connected in real life) and thought about installing something, with a facebook/g+ login with oauth. I thought about maybe a wordpress + budypress thing but.. maybe I'm missing something better ? The first requirement is that anybody must select his parents, so that an ancestry tree can be created, etc...
- chappi42 11y ago> Side question what about sandstorm.io, rocket chat (and there are more apps which may fit) ?
- gramakri 11y agoPitching my own company here: https://www.cloudron.io https://www.cloudron.io . Cloudron is a smartserver that lets you run web apps. You can add users in the web ui and users can access all the apps that you install on the server. https://cloudron.io/appstore.html https://cloudron.io/appstore.html has the app listing (rocket.chat, owncloud, ghost) to name a few.
- visakanv 11y agoWhy not just create a Facebook group? What features are you missing?
- givinguflac 11y agoPrivacy?
- patcon 11y agoDoing group chats with my family of 5 using Signal private messenger. The privacy guarantee is nice, but I'll admit there are lots of little issues in Signal group chats, often between iOS and Android.
- fiatjaf 11y ago
- kingnight 11y agoWhat is this curl script that calls out to Find My iPhone... I'm surprised that the web api is trivial enough to script but would love to use it.
- jzig 11y agoAgreed that was probably the most interesting tidbit for me to read in the article. I never considered using Slack integrations for personal use cases but it was nice to read about it here.
- zrail 11y agoIt's not really scriptable, but if you look at the network traffic you can "copy as curl" one of the URLs that pop up as you're playing with "Find My Friends" on icloud.com and paste it into a terminal. It will return a JSON blob with geo information of all of your friends. I don't know how long the cookie that "copy as curl" grabs lasts, but if it's long-lived I can absolutely see dropping it into a little script and feeding the lat/long into a static Google Maps tile URL.
- kingnight 11y agoRight on. I would have figured that iCloud would have one of those iterating cookies (I have no idea what it's really called) where each request iterates the request-data of each subsequent http call so a copy curl wouldn't work. Very cool automation.
- fjallstrom 11y agothere are loads of github repos for this, i just grabbed one and was on my way.
- jzig 11y agoI was so intrigued with the idea of this, and didn't quite find anything I liked, that I whipped up a javascript version of this for use later. It's minimal at the moment, but it works: https://github.com/jziggas/node-icloud https://github.com/jziggas/node-icloud
- iuguy 11y agoFor those who don't want to use Slack but want some sort of family automation, Huginn[1] may be useful. [1] - https://github.com/cantino/huginn/ https://github.com/cantino/huginn/
- lfx 11y agowow! cool tool, thanks for the link!
- dberg 11y agoThis looks amazing.
- jklinger410 11y agoThis is amazing.
- bedros 11y agoa great concept, anything like this in python?
- tannedNerd 11y agoCheck out https://home-assistant.io https://home-assistant.io similar but with some extra home automation focus.
- erikbigelow 11y agoNice job
- cableshaft 11y agoThat's pretty neat. I wanted to create something similar to this in python, but it looks like you saved me the trouble.
- simonswords82 11y agoAs a B2B SaaS app founder I dream of the day when our app generates this type of positive, organic coverage so effortlessly. It's no wonder Slack are growing at such a rate, they've built something that provides a serious amount of value to people.
- visakanv 11y agoThere are a few things to unpackage here! 1. Whenever you catch yourself thinking that something uncommon is effortless, you're probably not seeing what's going on behind the scenes. Or at least– getting to the point when you've set the flywheel in motion (and people are trying to use your product or idea as a centerpiece for discussing something of their own) is non-trivial! But I'm sure you know this. 2. There are B2B SaaS apps that provide a serious amount of value that grow nicely, but still don't grow as quickly as Slack does– Slack is kind of an outlier in this regard. 3. There's a predictable news cycle that these things go through: https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-narrative-on-companies-it-covers-5f89fdb7793e https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-n... Within this model, Slack is currently between 4 and 6 o' clock. This will change, inevitably.
- jedberg 11y agoRight now my wife and I just use Google calendar and iMessage, but I can see a time soon when my child can speak, read and type where it might be handy to have a group chat. Although reading this now I wonder if it would be handy to have this for my in-laws who all live in the area, since right now we all have to coordinate via email.
- rekoros 11y agoBut how would you deal with losing history? 10K messages is not very many. I've been using gmail/gtalk for ~12 years -- I can quickly dig up (and regularly do) pretty much anything my parents and I ever talked about. I consider this to be the killer feature (vs, say, hotmail, where I had to keep deleting messages because of the 10MB limit, back in the day).
- jedberg 11y ago> But how would you deal with losing history? 10K messages is not very many. That's a good point, although in practice I rarely have to search through our message history. Also, since we're using iMessage, it's really hard to search anyway.
- cdcarter 11y agoYou have a very affordable paid option if you need paid features!
- stevesearer 11y agoIf you haven't already, shared photo albums on iOS are a really great way to share baby pics with family members without overwhelming your Instagram feeds or having to email all of the time.
- veritas20 11y agoSeems like a great use of Slack. Unfortunately, my first and only experience with Slack has not been a fantasy. I joined a public slack on startups and everytime I check, I'm 100+ messages behind. Seems like a giant chat room. I'm missing the magic.
- opticalfiber 11y agoWell, yeah. That's not the intended use case for Slack. People do use it for public groups organized around a shared interest, but it is intended for teams or companies.
- balls187 11y agoMy wife and I use slack. In the past ~6 months we: got engage, planned a wedding, a wedding reception (2 different dates), honeymoon to Australia, a baby, a new house, and renting out our townhome. While slack is really a gussied up messaging platform, the extra polish they have on things like search, pins, and documents, made planning and executing on 3 of lifes major milestones significantly easier to manage. So far we use only a couple of integrations: google calendar, and a custom build slash-command that pushes events to IFTTT's Google calendar event reciepe.
- TheGRS 11y agoYou got engaged over slack?
- jameshart 11y agoThe slack 'reactions' feature is a real lifesaver for that kind of thing.
- skewart 11y ago/propose girlfriend
- mmanfrin 11y agoWell, technically hubot did the engaging.
- balls187 11y agoHah. No. That I did in person (though I did flub up my rehersed speech) https://www.instagram.com/p/3dJYnyOtVg/?taken-by=balls187 https://www.instagram.com/p/3dJYnyOtVg/?taken-by=balls187
- jeremyw 11y agoI built a Slack bot to digitize movies, so everyone in the house knows when to swap discs, figure out tracks and post to the TV hub. https://github.com/jeremywohl/moviebot https://github.com/jeremywohl/moviebot
- nextos 11y agoWould this be doable with IRC?
- agopaul 11y agoWell, yes people have been doing similar stuff with IRC bots. But you would miss the possibility to show widgets inside the chat client (eg. map, calendar, etc)
- Pawka 11y agoSlack has IRC gateway too ;-)
- forgotmypassw 11y agoAbsolutely yes (aside from visuals).
- jalada 11y agoWe plan our vacations in Trello! Personally I think that's less hardcore than using Slack for family group chat.
- splatcollision 11y agoTrello is great for vacation planning - have used it for this purpose!
- callmeed 11y agoDoes anyone have a favorite "Shared Family Calendar"? We need something to keep track of everyone's school schedule, reports/projects due, sports games/practices, etc. etc. I've tried Google and Trello ... wondering if there's something better.
- petepete 11y agoOut of interest, why didn't shared Google calendars work for you? It works quite well for us.
- callmeed 11y agoIt didn't "not work" but neither of my kids have gmail accounts so they can't see the calendar on their devices. I just thought there might be something a little more vertical/family-focused.
- eddieplan9 11y agoThe Family Sharing in iCloud works exceptionally well for us.
- jeena 11y agoOwncloud?
- julianz 11y agoWhat does Google not do? In our family of 4 everyone has their own calendar and there are a couple of other shared ones that we can all see, and it works great.
- davidbrent 11y agoSomeone at work was recently giving me the slack pitch, and mentioned the cool bot that be configured to announce people, answer questions etc... It made me very nostalgic for my old IRC friends, both people and eggdrop bots alike.
- digi_owl 11y agoI have long held that IM (in particular MSN Messenger) was what killed community usage of IRC. Before XP shipped with Messenger bundled, and aggressively pushed (i recall you would get a big window in your face on first login "demanding" you set up an account), basically everyone with a net connection in the local area was found on one or more regional channels. After IM came however, things became very "cliche-y" as people were "approving" each other over IM and then dropping off IRC.
- luckydata 11y agoI use Hangouts for that sort of things and this dude pretty much gave Google and Facebook their roadmap for the next couple years.
- chermanowicz 11y ago"It turns out our school is living in the future, providing a RSS-feed per child." That's crazy (awesome).
- oldgun 11y agoSee, people. This is how Slack should be used. For family daily use, not as the only communication tool for opensource projects.
- ergo14 11y agoWhat's the benefit of using this for family vs hangouts?
- georgehotelling 11y agoIs it possible to get all the stuff in the article integrated with Hangouts?
- rcarmo 11y agoSmiled as I read this, seeing as I'm on Slack largely due to my "extended family" from my previous job (everyone else left but we stayed in touch over Slack).
- runn1ng 11y agoThey should have used IRC.
- perseusprime11 11y agoDid you look into Trello?
- jhgg 11y agoI just moved into a house w/ a few room-mates, and we were looking to make a discord channel for the house and write some bots around home automation.
- guillegette 11y agoFor those using Slack, I recommend you to check out this to-do app http://www.zlapps.com/todo http://www.zlapps.com/todo Disclaimer: I built it :)
- simpixelated 11y agoI use this for groceries and it's great! Really easy to add items as I think of them, then check the list while at the store. Thanks for the app!
- cryptos 11y agoIt is cool to have all these conversation been backed up by the NSA ;-)