Email has been the major communication vehicle through my career. The work team I joined a year ago uses Slack. Our employer's official vehicle for "chat" is Teams. My team's high school interns prefer Discord. Some friends use FB Messenger. Others use text.
I have no preference. In the end, all of them can send messages point-to-point or broadcast. You can share documents in all of them. (I haven't tried it in Discord but I assume you can.) I can communicate and get work done in any other them.
Just a few observations.
1. Trying to figure out who communicated where can become challenging.
2. Better integration with "productivity" apps can make 1 less challenging. For instance, a co-worker requests a new API by a certain date. If it's done in Slack, for example, it would help to have it appear in my task list without my having to add it manually. Likewise, a friend sends a message in FB messenger about a cookout: having it go to my calendar would be helpful rather than my remembering a week later which app she sent the message in so I can put it on the calendar manually.
3. My employer is notorious for abusing email. We have message threads with 10-20 people and dozens of replies. Often I would love a way to opt out: a real opt out, not a reply with a request to Reply All minus me. Not having this feature is a deal breaker for email going forward IMO.
In my opinion the real power of slack is the historical search. I can't tell you how many times in my career i've asked a coworker to foward me some email that has critical information in it. On slack, that information is available to me, even if I joined months after that information was distributed. It reduces the amount of information that is imprisioned.
That's one of the ways Slack is more chatroom-like. Good point.
Email would be a bit clunkier as someone from the email thread would have to forward it to you or reply all with you in it. It's an alternative, but not as slick as Slack.
I agree with you. The one thing about just muting a thread is that if that is client side, the rest of the thread may still be assuming you are up to date. I think we need a better way to handle group email/text that isn't "shout at the world".
Uhm, this whole article is essentially "we built a product on top of Gmail, look how awesome it is", doesn't really explain why email is better than Slack or other apps.
EDIT: it seems the title of submission was changed (previously it said that email is better than Slack)
One thing I dislike is people sending one documents over Slack. Slack and similar are a terrible document storage systems. Here e-mail is definitely better. But when people get to used to Slack and its ilk, they start to send documents via the same channel, when it probably should have been by e-mail.
E-mail lets me take my time, IM does not. I am not usually able to look at documents sent me instantly, I will do so when I have the time. So when someone sends me a document via Slack, I usually tell them to e-mail it instead. Or - when it's a repeat offender - I ignore until they inquiry about whether I've read the document.
One thing I don't like about this is that having your internal and external comms in the same channel presents a large risk of some user making a mistake inside that channel and accidentally sharing internal information externally.
I can't count the number of times I've seen people reply-all when they shouldn't have (and come very close myself), reply to the wrong chain, forward sensitive information that was shown way back at the beginning of a long chain. I remember one incredibly egregious case where my director and manager had a long, drawn out discussion about terminating one of my coworkers in an email thread. About how it really needed to be done, but the timing wasn't ideal because they needed her to wrap up an important client project, but she was kind of bad at her job, so maybe they should do it now, but there wasn't anyone to pick the project up so they agreed to wait a month and a half.
Later on their conversation turned to some other things that were relevant to my work, and the director forwarded the whole chain to me and one other person on the team to "see the details in this chain."
Of course we brought it to the boss' attention, but the damage was done, and my coworker and I couldn't un-know what we had read, nor could we say anything to our coworker.
That was an incredibly uncomfortable and stressful 6 weeks sitting next to the woman every day who I knew was going to be fired soon and being unable to say anything.
I've seen people reply-all griping about clients and get walked out of the building minutes later.
Yes, I realize that the "where was that message? Email or slack (or whatever)?" is a legit problem that creates some friction. But for my money, reducing the risk of blunders like that far outweighs the problems it presents. I really really want isolated channels.
In communication, context is everything. People are also lazy and switching contexts is mentally exhausting. Both channels and email threads have context isolation issues.
When a company builds its product to tightly integrate with another company's product, I always feel like asking:
- What will you do if the other company decides to change the way it looks/acts/feels without consulting you?
- What will you do if the other company decides to take active measures to stop you hijacking their product?
- What will you do if the other company decides that you've got some great ideas and they will implement those features themselves?
It doesn't actually matter what the answers are to those questions, because they all boil down to the same result for the customer: someday this is going to stop working, so I had better not rely on it even if it does seem to be shiny and useful right now.
As if they don't have to worry about... this is a Chrome extension you have to download in the Google Chrome Store.
So if Google doesn't like it, they don't have to obfuscate the Gmail HTML/design, or send them a cease or desist... they simply can remove it from the Chrome Store.
I understand why Slack would want to stay away from an open protocol, since their business is so tied to building a moat around keeping businesses on Slack. Everything they do is to make Slack better and stickier for businesses.
A counterpoint, though, is to think about the long game. Since email is an open protocol, it will likely _never_ go away. There is incredible leverage around this. Businesses & tools built on email will work for a long, long time. There is a legitimate business case to be made, today, for building things on email, and that, in turn, makes email stickier.
Perhaps Slack stays forever, but perhaps not. It's possible that a new productivity fad comes into play and makes chat apps a thing of the past. If it's built on an open protocol - and an open protocol that's not restricted to one workspace - then Slack will likely exist for a long, long time.
Well they could start at making their website better... changing the website title to flash "(1)" (indicating a fictional unread message) is incredibly annoying.
I hate to be the guy but this isn't really making email better, is it? This is just making Gmail better. And if this becomes a wide-spread tool Gmail will become necessary and that would be everything but beneficial for email.
I’m one of the few people who actually like and prefer email. Because it is an open standard there are is a whole ecosystem of tools to help with managing it as opposed to be locked into a single vendor’s default experience.
The thing I’ve noticed with people who HATE email is they try and treat email as though it’s an app like Slack and they let themselves be constantly interrupted and respond to things as they come in.
My system is pretty simple. I have specific times during the day where I check email. Otherwise it’s closed. When I check, I look to see if it can be deleted/archived, is it actionable, does it need to be dealt with now or later. I NEVER respond to emails while triaging. All I’m doing is clearing the inbox and determine how things should be filtered. I also look for opportunities to create rules to auto sort a particular type of email.
The email gets put into to my task manager and I respond when I make it to that task on the list. I may set the priority depending on urgency but my goal is to treat responding to email like any other work task and not some special thing that trumps all other work. I think this is where people slip up. Someone sending me an email does not make them more important than the other tasks that I may be working on.
> There are so many places to find information (“Was that in an email? Slack? Trello? Basecamp?)
How is your tool going to solve that? Looks like adding one more place to me. Most companies can't/won't move completely to Gmelius (or some other all-in-one tool).
Granted, i didn't read much further because the fake chat notification (https://i.vgy.me/QINgMY.gif) made me close the tab.
What do you mean by "turned off"? Did you turn notifications off? Do you not open the e-mail client? Do you no longer have a valid e-mail address with big corp?
Congratulations, that flashing title with UNREAD MESSAGE is new most annoying thing on the internet. You reinvented the blink tag I hope you're all proud.
Genuinely curious, why does Slack keep being compared to email, is it not more comparative with chat services like IRC?
To me they solve different problems
IRC was never used by the general population like email (and now Slack). 10 years ago I worked at a company where the dev team used IRC for chat, and the non-devs didn't use chat because IRC was too daunting.
1. People under 30 generally -hate- email, some even refuse to use it
2. Building a product on top of a Google product, even if it is Gmail?
3. Stop trying to make email something that it's not. Basecamp, Slack, Trello, they're successful because they aren't email. Add-ons to email are just headaches for everyone
According to this link (just a quick google search for email usage by age) shows that young people (<25) are more likely to use email than folks over 45, coming in at 91% of younger people in the US using email.
Do they -hate- it? Harder to say, but I think that if 9/10 people use it, they likely don't hate it.
I can never reach my non-technical friends any more by email, I have to use text messaging or facebook messaging. My more technical family members use slack.
Sure everyone has an email account, but the less technical seem to not be using it any more. The excuse they give is that it is filled with spam and they don't know how to get rid of the spam.
If I absolutely want to reach everyone in a diverse group I use text messaging even though I hate text messaging.
Define “use”. I have several email accounts that I hardly ever use, and it’s the same case for many of my peers. Most people over 45 I know have email accounts they do check regularly. Yes, more young people are aware of and connected to modern technology; but I would argue that older people who use it, e.g., for their jobs, make much more substantial use of it.
"refuse to use" email - good luck with that. The rest of us in the real world, using email on a daily basis, would love for it to be more than it is. At least more than a message sender. What's wrong with a tool that adds a few cool features on top of Gmail? Unless you particularly enjoy bouncing around and using different tools to get your job done...
1. It has always been the case that younger people like more instant communication. Instant messaging is not new. As people grow up they tend to find utility in using a tool where you can communicate with more people.
2. Access to a potentially huge user base.
3. Basecamp, Slack and Trello all depend on emails to get users to re-engage. Slack less so that Basecamp and Trello
Email has been the major communication vehicle through my career. The work team I joined a year ago uses Slack. Our employer's official vehicle for "chat" is Teams. My team's high school interns prefer Discord. Some friends use FB Messenger. Others use text.
I have no preference. In the end, all of them can send messages point-to-point or broadcast. You can share documents in all of them. (I haven't tried it in Discord but I assume you can.) I can communicate and get work done in any other them.
Just a few observations.
1. Trying to figure out who communicated where can become challenging.
2. Better integration with "productivity" apps can make 1 less challenging. For instance, a co-worker requests a new API by a certain date. If it's done in Slack, for example, it would help to have it appear in my task list without my having to add it manually. Likewise, a friend sends a message in FB messenger about a cookout: having it go to my calendar would be helpful rather than my remembering a week later which app she sent the message in so I can put it on the calendar manually.
3. My employer is notorious for abusing email. We have message threads with 10-20 people and dozens of replies. Often I would love a way to opt out: a real opt out, not a reply with a request to Reply All minus me. Not having this feature is a deal breaker for email going forward IMO.