How we use Slack in our family
labs.earthpeople.se
labs.earthpeople.se
While slack is really a gussied up messaging platform, the extra polish they have on things like search, pins, and documents, made planning and executing on 3 of lifes major milestones significantly easier to manage.
So far we use only a couple of integrations: google calendar, and a custom build slash-command that pushes events to IFTTT's Google calendar event reciepe.
As you said, luckily it all worked out.
GMail also has built-in search. Google docs has documents. Both are free.
Gmail's search is very good (but only useful if everyone avoids the habit of using Email like an IM client [ie unhelpful body and subject texts]).
Google doc's is okay.
Without thinking about it, slack organizes your messages into topics (aka channels), and it's easy to drag-n-drop files into channels, which are then archived, and easily found.
In slack, I can (and do) have multiple conversations with the same person, but organized around topics.
In hangouts, how do I easily see the files that have been sent? I opened a hangout I've had with a buddy of mine, and it (at least to me) wasn't obvious where those files are.
Also, how do I star a comment? In slack, it's handy to star a comment, or even pin them, to make finding them easier.
No question that you get slack like functionality across a myriad of tools you currently use and are familiar with. However as far as an integrated, easy to use experience, Slack is fairly compelling.
> Does hangouts have a concept of topics?
Yes, in that you can title group conversations. It's weak though.
> From my limited uses of it, if you chat with a single person, you can't create a new chat with that person around a different topic.
AFAICT, this is correct. If you try to make a group chat with only one person, it will just open the existing chat that you have open with that person.
> In hangouts, how do I easily see the files that have been sent?
I honestly have no idea. whenever I've needed to send a file to someone over hangouts, I share a dropbox link.
> Also, how do I star a comment? In slack, it's handy to star a comment, or even pin them, to make finding them easier.
This is not possible AFAIK.
Slack helped us keep focused and organized without a lot of effort on our part.
Also we had a lot of luck, pretty much everything went according to plan.
Side question : anybody here using some sort of hosted family social network ? I'm thinking about doing that. We have a huge family (around 200 alive members who are connected in real life) and thought about installing something, with a facebook/g+ login with oauth. I thought about maybe a wordpress + budypress thing but.. maybe I'm missing something better ? The first requirement is that anybody must select his parents, so that an ancestry tree can be created, etc...
what about sandstorm.io, rocket chat (and there are more apps which may fit) ?
Best of all, I don't have to maintain a thing...
There isn't nearly as much 'chatting' there as 'information sharing'... announcing milestones (pre-public baby announcements)... Etc.
For example, we just had one family decide they want to go to Knots Berry Farm the day after the wedding... Those who are interested replied, those who won't be sticking around or otherwise not interested didn't reply... so each post becomes a sort of persistent channel about a topic.
We have posts about the suggested hotel, and another post about a large AirBnB house that several families are going in on.
We're talking about 5 comments a day, max... and sometimes weeks w/o anything. We're generally fairly 'public' about things and use regular wall posts for general communication.
Here are the reasons for wanting a private network: * Wanted to teach my young daughter how to behave and what to be prepared for (i.e. cyber bullying) while utilizing social media...BUT...In a safe environment before going out and facebooking with her friends and such. I think of this environment as my daughter's staging social network before she deploys to production. ;-) * Wanted to talk with my wife via private mechanisms that aren't as easily mined for data. Signal (the app) has actually replaced this need quite nicely: https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal . But its nice to know we can still use our private social network for private conversations. Though admit my stack is absolutely no match for NSA-type intrusions. * Wanted to keep MY OWN ARCHIVES of a timeline of important family events. If i lose an important photo/note, its on me, and I don't have to rely on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Challenges I faced (and you might want to consider): * My daughter is already getting fed mis-information from her (air-headed) young friends that facebook, twitter and the like are the only social networks in existence (or the only ones that matter in their eyes). It took some teaching to inform my young daughter that the web is open, and that Daddy can manage our very own network, thank you very much. ;-) * My wife has a habit of relying on conventional text messaging - she is by no means a tech guru, so tends to forget that we have our own social network and text messaging isn't needed between us 3. * All the usual challenges that come with self-hosting stuff: uptime/availability, software updates, maintenance, etc. are your responsibility. Like spider man's uncle Ben said: with great power comes responsibility.
Here's some info which may help you decide what would work best for your scenario (understanding i don;t know what your skills or expected time investments are):
* I tested out Friendica - which was pretty straight-forward to install (just simple PHP stack) but seemed a little cumbersome to use. To be clear, it does alot out of the box, though now thinking, maybe it was too much GUI, widgets, etc. for my small family...And, what I needed was simple service, like a private twitter. I am interested when the red matrix project (same originators of Friendica) becomes more mature. Ultimately, i killed this Friendica installation and moved on.
* I tried pump.io, which actually is pretty cool...but because all my stuff is on a small VPS infrasturcutre, pump.io seems to want to be on its own vps...So, to install it on infrastructure that is shared with my personal site, etc. just seemed to consume too much time. i abandoned this - just didn't have time to play sysadmin. Much like red matrix, here's another project that has a bright future (at least i hope). Just understand: pump.io is a protocol and not a single app/server, so until the killer server setup is created (to implement said protocol), I think adoption - for folks who can but don';t have time to play sysadmin - might be slower than it could be. By the way, from the mobile client perspective, I played around one of the more popular clients: Impeller (http://impeller.e43.eu), which actually worked really well. Before I setup my own test server, i tried it on another person's server (that opened up public registrations) and found impeller to be pretty fast/nimble.
* Finally, I installed and have been using Gnu Social for many, many months now. The install was a simple php stack, some-what straight-forward. The only annoying thing is that the documentation - at last months ago - was slightly inconsistent between website and what gets downloaded with installation bundle. But in actually once that inconsistency was surpassed, the install scripts work pretty well. It was the simplest of the installs compared to the platforms i referenced above. An important point: what actually kept me on this platform so far has been the mobile client (an app called &status: http://andstatus.org). While the platform itself seems pretty solid (I can't speak to scaling issues, considering I have only 3 users!). But this mobile client is pretty freaking fast/nimble; and i don't think its my little VPS! There was another client called mustard which worked ok too. I suppose because the underlying platform is decent enough, but the clients really shine here. In this case, with my wife being more used to native styles of text messaging apps, &status really helped with her adoption. In any case, Gnu social is what i have been running with, and so far so good.
There are many other options (buddycloud, diaspora, etc.) which i did not try, but which might be quite worthwhile depending on your use-cases.
Good luck!
Not sure about their business model, I would pay for the privacy and safety angle.
(Its available as apt-get install in debian unstable)
That's crazy (awesome).
I'm missing the magic.
I'm surprised that the web api is trivial enough to script but would love to use it.
I don't know how long the cookie that "copy as curl" grabs lasts, but if it's long-lived I can absolutely see dropping it into a little script and feeding the lat/long into a static Google Maps tile URL.
Very cool automation.
That is actually really cool. Are there any privacy concerns though?
What does this have to do with the security of the feed?
"[The system] should not require secrecy, and it should not be a problem if it falls into enemy hands"
Which gives rise to the idea of "security though obscurity" is bad. A system is said to rely on obscurity if the bad guy learning any facts about it (other than the special secret keys) represents a compromise.
Security through obscurity means that if the details of the algorithm are known then your secrets are no longer secret. It relys on keeping the encyption method itself secret.
Compare with most good encryption methods, if you know which algorithm was used to encrypt my hard drive you cant use that information to decrypt it. The algorithm is published and the enemy knows the system but the system is still secure.
given it's for feeds you have to (most likely) manually regenerate them
I've tried Google and Trello ... wondering if there's something better.
I just thought there might be something a little more vertical/family-focused.
1. Whenever you catch yourself thinking that something uncommon is effortless, you're probably not seeing what's going on behind the scenes. Or at least– getting to the point when you've set the flywheel in motion (and people are trying to use your product or idea as a centerpiece for discussing something of their own) is non-trivial! But I'm sure you know this.
2. There are B2B SaaS apps that provide a serious amount of value that grow nicely, but still don't grow as quickly as Slack does– Slack is kind of an outlier in this regard.
3. There's a predictable news cycle that these things go through: https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-n... Within this model, Slack is currently between 4 and 6 o' clock. This will change, inevitably.
Although reading this now I wonder if it would be handy to have this for my in-laws who all live in the area, since right now we all have to coordinate via email.
I've been using gmail/gtalk for ~12 years -- I can quickly dig up (and regularly do) pretty much anything my parents and I ever talked about. I consider this to be the killer feature (vs, say, hotmail, where I had to keep deleting messages because of the 10MB limit, back in the day).
That's a good point, although in practice I rarely have to search through our message history.
Also, since we're using iMessage, it's really hard to search anyway.
It made me very nostalgic for my old IRC friends, both people and eggdrop bots alike.
Before XP shipped with Messenger bundled, and aggressively pushed (i recall you would get a big window in your face on first login "demanding" you set up an account), basically everyone with a net connection in the local area was found on one or more regional channels.
After IM came however, things became very "cliche-y" as people were "approving" each other over IM and then dropping off IRC.
Disclaimer: I built it :)
The challenge I feel is to determine if one should take a broad-based approach to family productivity that addresses all aspects or should one take a narrow high-value problem and solve for improving the productivity of that task. We have approached it from the point of view of making kids' activity planning as a task easier. We are going into beta in a week or so. We'll know if this works.