Slack App: Flickr Cofounder Creates ‘Slack App’ to Eliminate Need for Company Email

The Co-founder of Flickr and gaming company Tiny Speck, Stewart Butterfield, is back with a fresh idea which may suggest that you don't need to check your company e-mail anymore and literally cut some slack.

With the aim to focus on a completely different area – communication on working teams – Butterfield turned Tiny Speck into Slack. Slack is a collaboration app designed for group of designers, engineers, project managers and marketers.

The app has a thread of messages structured into multiple channels for different groups or projects. The app can also get data from third party services like Twitter and GoogleDocs. The design is to post notifications from these outside tools that companies use so that there won’t be a need to get e-mails from these services. Syncing in real-time between the iPhone app and desktop is also possible.

Slack’s goal is to eliminate the need for company e-mail completely. Though it seemed idealistic, Butterfield has accomplished it internally at his companies. Butterfield said in an interview with Forbes that in 10 years time, everyone will be using a centralized system for internal communication.

Competition with this industry is inevitable especially for Butterfield’s idea. Unlike other apps that focus on dissemination of messages like Chatter, private one-to-one messages and private groups are provided by Slack.

Butterfield said in the interview with Forbes that Slack has private messages and groups, advanced search tools and uploading and storing of files that Campfire doesn’t have. While differently from HipChat, Slack is not just providing messaging but trying to provide management and storage of files.

Slack has been running a test with beta customers and they stated that they receive 75 percent less email within three days after the usage of the service.

Glitch, an innovative online gaming startup, was previously created by Tiny Speck. Glitch was eventually shut down at the end of the last year. However, its technology that allowed real-time messaging and complex gaming actions across its users is one of its strongest features. At the same time, the idea for Slack came from personal experience at Tiny Speck, where the company fashioned its very own internal communications system assembled on IRC.

Butterfield said in Forbes, “We thought it was something crazy valuable and a product that no one else was making so we decided to bring it to a product.”