Messaging
Slack & the next step in the evolution of messaging
German version of this article
I am now communicating with my parents on Slack, having been inspired by this account of someone who uses Slack for family-internal communication. So far it works well, with no major issues encountered. Previously we have been using a messaging app – not WhatsApp like many, if not most other families in Europe, but Kik (don’t ask me how that happened). In any case, the concept of smartphone messaging was not foreign to them.
I created a new team on Slack, invited my parents, introduced them to how “public” channels and private messaging work on Slack, how to post content such as articles or videos. I created a specific channel for links to good articles (which we until now have been exchanging via email) and I informed them about that they can run Slack in the browser, too (Slack’s desktop app does not work with older Windows versions). My mother already asked me if she should recommend Slack to her friends as well, but I advised her to wait a bit since after all, the service is not optimized for the average (German) leisure user belonging to the generation 55+. Yet.
“Yet” because I start to think that what Slack offers in regards to functionality is the future of group communication in general. For all kinds of groups, not only those comprising of people who work together on projects. Slack represents the evolution of messaging and possibly even of social networking. Continue Reading
The rise of the permanent group chat
Smartphone messaging is huge. So huge that WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger have both been downloaded more than 1 billion times – for Android alone.
As often, in hindsight, the rise of chat apps seems obvious and predictable. After all, people had direct conversations since the beginning of humanity. The popularity of letters, telephone calls and text messaging (SMS) showed that people happily use every solution and technology available in order to satisfy their personal communication needs.
In many ways, messaging apps simply allow people to optimize and improve their one-to-one communication. It is an evolutionary process, not a revolution. Existing needs are satisfied in new ways – unlike with traditional social networking, which invented a kind of barrier-free, low cost one-to-many communication unheard of before.
However, there is one usage pattern of messaging apps that did not exist in the past. Something which truly changes our communication habits and lets us have a type of conversation that just was not possible before: the permanent group chat. Continue Reading