Slack Connect now allows you to DM anyone. So Long, Work-Life Balance

“When someone opens the phone,” said Frank Protocol, “If they are connecting with their friends, they click on Facebook or WhatsApp. If they are connecting with someone they work with, regardless of where that person works, they should click on Slack. ”(Note the comparison with social media here.)

Slack users and experts often refer to the app as an email killer, and a feature like Slack Connect appears to be more of a nail in the email coffin. Probably not. I say this not because email is Good– At the moment, I have more than 23,000 unread emails and this is not a humble feedback, it is a request for help, but because Slack chats and emails still have fundamental differences.

David Heinemeier Hansson, who created Ruby on Rails, founded the productivity software company Basecamp and rarely misses an opportunity to extol the benefits of Basecamp’s email product, cited some of these differentials for WIRED: “Chat is in real time, staccato thinking. E-mail is asynchronous, considered to be thought. Email is a protocol. You do not lose your contact list because you change your system. Everyone has email. “

Probably the worst thing about something like Slack’s chat is that it is “more of a platform,” says Heinemeier Hansson. “The last thing the world needs is another proprietary protocol that blocks a social graph for a single company.”

The structure of the email can support a more thoughtful experience (especially in a pandemic). But pants or texts can also be considered. So the most important question may be whether Slack Connect is good for chat, and what constitutes a good chat app in the year 2021. The first and perhaps most obvious feature of a good chat app is an airtight approach to privacy and security. Slack does not offer end-to-end encryption; organizations currently cannot be verified as official business on the platform, which seems more important now that people from other organizations can send messages; and, well, there is the initial confusion of allowing people to send attachments of potentially harmful messages in DM requests. Also, sorry guys: employers can read your Slack DMs, even though they seem private.

The next consideration is what kind of communication does chat really allow. Slack’s cascade of real-time updates, its threading features, its programmable bots, even the hodgepodge of emojis and GIFs, are as much part of the app’s appeal as potential distractions. Microsoft’s Office applications are vegetable; Slack is sweet. But sweets, of course, are not necessarily good for you. Anne Helen Peterson, a former media studies researcher who now writes a Substack newsletter on Internet culture, noted in the past that Slack has become a way of LARP our work – which is a live action role play – and it is one of the many work applications that contributes to the “sliding” between our professional and personal lives.