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Hard to agree. The author's point is Slack is gChat because both are asynchronous messengers, so we might as well replace gChat with iMessage/Facetime in this a
by nipponese 10y ago
Hard to agree. The author's point is Slack is gChat because both are asynchronous messengers, so we might as well replace gChat with iMessage/Facetime in this argument (or Skype, for that matter). No, the power of Slack is the API integration support, and for that you have to give credit where it's due to Slack.
- aerovistae 10y agoDid you read the article or just the first couple paragraphs? The author's point is that Slack, Facebook chat (the dominant force nowadays), and many other such applications descend in lineage from Gchat, which preceded all of them by many years. I thought gchat was an astonishing thing when it came out-- I couldn't believe I could just seamlessly chat with anyone through my email, and have it archivable and searchable. I spent years lamenting that very few people I knew used it. I am one of those hold-out classic style users as described by the article. I can still dream. It might be commonplace now, but gchat was the first of its kind for an in-browser experience, and it was incredibly well-implemented given that it was 2005. Worked perfectly. Google did indeed have something big, and they never promoted it or advanced it in such a way as for it to gain popularity, despite the massive gmail userbase. The fact that even now gmail has over a billion users and still gchat is mostly overlooked and unused is just sad, a truly impressive failure.