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Comment by bckr | Hacker News Reader

I thought Google Wave was a rad idea. We’re still trying to solve the problem it was about—-collaborating digitally means using a bunch of different tools. That might just be life though.

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We're sort of in this weird space where are still some phone calls and snail mail, texts, multiple chat apps, and email. They tend to be for somewhat different use cases but those are ill-defined and may be somewhat random even within a given organization.

Is it really a problem that needs solving? What’s the issue with having multiple means of communicating?

Fragmentation is something of an issue. I don't know if a given person at work mostly uses one of two chat applications or if they'll actually respond to an email. Personally, there's email but people I know use one of four different chat/text apps (five if you distinguish iMessage). Yes, notifications make some of that moot but there's a lot of fragmentation and I minimize my use of notifications in general.

(At work, it's partly that we've been migrating to Slack and you have people who basically only pay attention to slack and others who don't really use it.)

You don’t understand, we really need to be locked in a new walled garden

Losing track of information, and things not getting written down or forgotten about.

It gives a lot of power to The One App To Rule Them All though. And what happens when the company decides to switch to another system in 5-10 years?

Email at least has stood the test of time- Slack has not.

I still tend to favor email for a lot of things but understand that's increasingly a minority opinion especially for things that aren't routine updates, promotions, announcements, etc.

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