Slack.com

Live Chat app by Stewart Butterfield

https://slack.com/

WebIM combined with Universal Inbox?

Freemium https://ourplace.slack.com/pricing

What distinguishes Slack—and has earned it good reviews in the tech industry—is its ability to integrate chat with automated alerts and information delivered by “bots.” (Data and alerts from external services pop up in chat streams, and users can also easily program the software robots to reply when a user types a specific keyword.).. Slack creates searchable (Vertical Search Engine) chat streams for entire teams, small groups, and individuals in one window, and integrates a wide variety of other services... By way of example, Butterfield said that there are about 2,000 messages a day written by humans in Slack at his company. Another 6,000 more are generated automatically by machines.

Scott Rosenberg: https://medium.com/backchannel/shut-down-your-office-you-now-work-in-slack-fa83cb7cce6c

http://boingboing.net/2014/03/16/slack-team-communications-too.html

http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/12/slack-exits-beta/

Slack is built for teams of five to 150 people, and combines persistent chat rooms, private messaging and ways to integrate various work tools so teams can discuss notifications from them... To my eye, the thing that sets Slack apart is this idea of archiving and indexing a company’s discussions together so they can be searched. Some of the apps already integrated with Slack are GoogleDocs, Drop Box, Heroku, Crashlytics, GitHub and ZenDesk, along with various software tools... In fact, Slack is the second workplace collaboration product to emerge out of Tiny Speck. The other is Tom Foolery, led by Kakul Srivastava, which has more of a social approach... “I had been burned so many times with chat software. Like CampFire or HipChat, those things are hideous,” Jeff Atwood says. “But [with Slack] the hype is mostly warranted.”

There's a WebApp (which tempts me with WikiProxy potential), but I think most usage is from the Fat Client apps, esp Mobile.

old note: I have not used this for Team Work yet, but I'm very skeptical: 2013-10-12-BoydRealtimeCollaborationware

• update: I'm addicted to slack - bugging people with questions

Hubot

• Built-in integration
• Forward to Pandora Bots for AIML.

Jun'2019 IPO

Dec'2020 acquired by Salesforce.com