Slack Connect now allows you to dial anyone. So long, work and family balance

“When someone opens their phone,” Frank said Protocol, “If they connect with their friends, they click on Facebook or WhatsApp. If they’re connecting with someone you work with, no matter where you work, they should click Slack. ”(Note the comparison to social media here.)

Slack users and experts often refer to the app as an email killer, and a feature like Slack Connect seems to be another key to the email coffin. Probably not. I say no because email is well—I currently have over 23,000 unread emails and that is not a humble one, but asks for help, but because chats and Slack email still have such fundamental differences.

David Heinemeier Hansson, who created Ruby on Rails, co-founded the productivity software company Basecamp and rarely misses the opportunity to extol the benefits of Basecamp’s email product. . Email is asynchronous, it is considered thinking. Email is a protocol. Don’t lose your contact book because you switch systems. Everyone has email “.

Undoubtedly, the worst thing about something like Slack chat is that it is “one more platform,” says Heinemeier Hansson. “The last thing the world needs is another proprietary protocol that will block a social graph to a single company.”

The structure of email can support a more considered experience (especially in a pandemic). But they can also be considered slacks or texts. So the most important question may be whether Slack Connect is good chat, and what constitutes a good chat app in 2021. The first and perhaps the most obvious feature of a good chat app is an airtight approach to privacy and security. Slack does not offer end-to-end encryption; organizations currently cannot be verified as official companies on the platform, which seems more important now that people from other organizations can send messages; and, well, there’s the initial effort to allow people to send attachments of potentially harmful messages to DM requests. Plus, sorry, folks: employers can read your Slack DMs, even if they’re private.

The next consideration is what type of communication the chat actually allows. Slack’s cascade of real-time updates, its chat features, its programmable robots, even the emoji and GIF mix, are part of both the app’s appeal and possible distractions. Microsoft Office applications are vegetables; Slack is a candy. But sweets, of course, are not necessarily good for you. Anne Helen Peterson, a former media research researcher who now writes a Substack newsletter on Internet culture, has noted in the past that Slack has become a LARP way of doing work, which is a game of role in real action, and is one of the many work applications that helps to “slip” between our work life and our personal life.