Birdly for Slack

Slack is delightfully designed, with an elegant user interface which is intuitive and brings enjoyment back to corporate chat. The hierarchy of channels, secret groups and users works well to delineate conversations and ensure everything you read is important and intended for you. Notification settings for individual channels easily allow the user to personalize their experience. The ability to share many media types is also very useful, as file sharing is very important when working collaboratively. The fact that Slack has an API, and a strong one at that, is a relief. "Slackbots" can be created to provide pertinent information or even just entertainment. The cross-platform nature of the product is also incredibly useful when working with a device-diverse team. The channel and group metadata is also found to be very useful. By setting channel "purposes" and topics, you can greatly focus the conversation undertaken in the channel.

The software sometimes has bad performance, which can be quite problematic when an urgent message comes in. Also, the notification policies sometimes go awry, leading you to be notified for undesirable conversations. It would be great if there could be status updates, like AIM had. You can set yourself away but it would be great if it were easier to put a message up like, "In a meeting" and have the option to not get notifications on the computer or on the phone as it is easy to forget to make yourself active again until you try to message someone else.

We used to do all of our chats through google chat and email but it would get so sloppy and troublesome when we would have to do things like group chats and go back and look at a history of messages from a long time ago. It was also a real pain when we were trying to share things like mock-ups and designs with each other. Slack literally solved all of that. You can setup your own personal groupchats, search your chat history for a specific message, and they have desktop app that works great.