Thanks to this Quartz piece for that rather lovely headline. Mentioned in that piece is Slack, an interesting looking chat app that is touted by some as a more efficient way for teams to communicate internally and which is apparently growing rapidly in popularity since its launch in February, notably amongst technologists including teams at Adobe, Medium, and Rdio. Slack's USP is that it initiates messages as chats before converting them to emails when someone isn't available, and has the capability to unify the many fragmented ways in which in which we communicate into one stream and make it searchable.
It was Gmail's tenth anniversary last week (this TIME article tells the story of how it came about, how it so nearly didn't happen, and is worth a read) and I find the search within Gmail to be fantastically useful. So the interesting thing about Slack, as the piece points out, is that it ends the need to constantly categorize and sort everything we do and that search becomes the defining way in which we organise. CEO and Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield is quoted as saying “We think of Slack as a search product that has a messaging app built in". With the sheer volume of communication we all deal with, this actually makes quite a lot of sense.
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