Billionaire Brothers Want to Build a Cheaper Rival to Slack (bloomberg.com) 93
Saritha Rai, writing for Bloomberg: A teenage entrepreneur who became a millionaire by 20 before sharing a billion-dollar fortune at 36, Bhavin Turakhia isn't afraid to think big. Now he's putting $45 million of his own money into building a rival to Slack and other office messaging platforms. Flock, a cloud-based team collaboration service, has attracted 25,000 enterprise users and customers including Tim Hortons, Whirlpool and Princeton University. It's a market that has already drawn interest from global technology giants Facebook, Amazon.com and Microsoft. This time last year, few had heard of Bhavin and his younger brother Divyank. That changed when they sold their advertising technology company Media.net, with customers including Yahoo, CNN and the New York Times, to a Chinese consortium for $900 million. The all-cash deal catapulted the duo from mere millionaires into the ranks of the super-rich. "I want to make Flock bigger and better than anything I've built before," Bhavin Turakhia, wearing his signature dark Levi's T-shirt and Puma sweatpants, said at his Bangalore offices.
IRC is still free I think (Score:5)
That's cheaper than slack
Re:IRC is still free I think (Score:5, Funny)
I think you meant "IRC is still free IIRC."
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Mod parent up!
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This is funny.
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No, iIRC is an Apple competitor to IRC, with the tagline "IRC - It's Real Crap".
XMPP too.. (Score:1)
although it really needs the format converted to JSON and support for SCTP for doing voice and video applications with it.
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HIPSTER ALERT!!!
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msgpack is more efficient.
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Jabba, xmpp. But regardless, Social media has become the new Internet Explorer to the internet. I'd say all communication platforms should comply with open standards that allow for extension and growth. The problem is that none of it is. We have IRC (rfc1459) we have xmpp (rfcXYXYX) and then the populated platforms run on totally un-standardised closed platforms. I'd say both Apple and Google would welcome such an initiative.
Social media should be decentralised it should interconnected and controlled by cho
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Pfft. Python on a Mac? How backwards are you?
You should be writing javascript /w angular 2 and react and at least 2 other frameworks that are no less recent than 6 months, using your iPad.
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Pfft. Python on a Mac? How backwards are you?
You should be writing javascript /w angular 2 and react and at least 2 other frameworks that are no less recent than 6 months, using your iPad.
That is, after all, how we got Hangouts.
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Oh FFS. Only in the Javascript world can you be sarcastic and have it become a prediction. :P
Re:IRC is still free I think (Score:5, Interesting)
Mattermost is also free, self-hostable, and *very* Slack-like. I like it better.
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Seriously?
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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Yahoo Mail is better than GMail at this point.Gmail hasn't added any quality-of-life improvements in years. I'd be curious as to what all the engineers that support GMail actually do since Marissa Myers left.
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IRC doesn't let you see history without special bots and shit, it doesn't have built-in screen sharing or video, etc. I wish peolple would stop bringing up IRC as if it was really a competitor.
Indeed. These are all reasons why it's better than Slack [he wrote, stroking his grey beard and frowning at the children frolicking perilously close to his lawn].
'round these parts, we use RocketChat, which the Slack fans claim is a pale imitation. But I've seen some Slack demos and don't grasp the attraction. I'd take RC over Slack, IRC over RC, and Usenet over IRC. I've never found live messaging very useful.
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Only if you aren't hosting a server. It would still probably be $2-$3 a month to host a micro VM in the cloud.
What really cracks me up is this comment:
Criticism about being a copycat doesnâ(TM)t faze Bhavin and neither does Slackâ(TM)s high profile investors and lofty valuation.
Copycat? Of what? Slack?! I like slack but Slack is just a copycat of AIM groups.
Yes .. exactly what we need .. (Score:1)
Indeed what we need is yet another communication/messaging platform. Preferably one that is closed/proprietary and a walled garden.
Hooray.
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And this is when I wish I had mod points.
It is pretty sad when accessing slack via firefox uses less resources than the slack client. Makes you wonder what that client is doing :)
With Mattermost and Rocket.Chat being free (Score:1)
what would you need billionaires to help with?
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Hoarding the money?
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Slack doesn't have the image of grey neckbeards or pimpled filled teenage nerds. That's all I can come up with
Re:IRC vs Slack (Score:5, Informative)
You can make a slack out of irc, but:
-Consistent server side log with conversation replay (you can kind of sort of do it with ZNC, but it's hokey, and you never know if the person you are talking to has seen or not seen what you said prior to them joining).
-Sadly, network security has settled on a magical decision that ports 80 and 443 are secure, but others are not necessarily so. It's nonsensical, but the reality.
-Consistent assumptions about how clients are/are not rendering your markdown or whatever, notably pasting things like images or weblinks will behave consistently regardless of who you sent it to
So the biggest benefit IRC has is federation, which frankly isn't that helpful for smaller communities, and in fact netsplits make it more aggravating than helpful. A solution like mattermost is I think the best slack alternative. All the fancy webification and such people crave, no netsplits, and no cost and still open source.
Re:IRC vs Slack (Score:4, Informative)
Slack is a push technology that operates even when you're offline. Coworkers on the other side of the world can post, and you can pick up the conversation when you get up. Conversations you start from home can be continued at the office, or en route (as long as you're not the driver).
Slack has nearly everything IRC has, except netsplits, and builds on top: persistence, search (it's not great, but better than IRC), rendering, sharing of multimedia directly inline (images, videos, etc.), voice calls, including group calls, ability to thread messages even inside a single channel. And I'm probably missing some stuff.
What you don't lose compared to IRC: channels, direct messages, slash commands, bots (it has an API you can use to write bots of varying interoperability), multiple servers connected simultaneously (I am connected to 4 slack domains in my slack client now, which is coincidentally also the number of IRC servers I'm connected to in my IRC client). Okay, so your existing IRC bots won't work as-is, but I don't treat that as a fatal flaw.
What I do miss from IRC when in slack, especially a large slack, is individual operator access on a channel-by-channel basis. I don't need op access to #corporate-messaging, but as the team lead, it would be helpful to have some level of op restriction to #my-team-dev-chat. Then again, I don't see nearly as much eternal-september-type trolling, so it's not been a huge problem so far.
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As much as I recognize the improvements slack provide, I'm right there with you with 'oh look, *another* messaging platform that thinks they'll not have their lunch eaten by a cheaper alternative'.
Chat has never been a particularly healthy area for long term commercial viability.
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Slack has emoji!
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It was to let you know that when you're a rich douchebag, nobody cares if you wear sweatpants every day.
Sweat Pants (Score:2)
Mattermost, open source alternative (Score:1)
With Mattermost there is also an open source alternative to slack which companies can host on there own.
The pricing model for enterprise users is also very competitive.
Matrix.org is free / Open Source (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Matrix.org is free / Open Source (Score:4, Funny)
Discord (Score:1)
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All you corporate info are belong to us (Score:3, Insightful)
And then we'll cash out once you suckers feed us enough of that info.
I don't get it, why would large companies not control this kind of service themselves for security reasons?
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MatterMost (Score:1)
MatterMost is free, it looks and feels exactly like Slack. Problem solved.
Mattermost! (Score:4, Insightful)
I use Slack daily at work, and a self-hosted Mattermost instance daily for personal projects with other remote participants. I much prefer Mattermost.
At work I'll frequently make the mistake of trying to format my messages with markdown, because I'm so used to Mattermost offering this feature.
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Soo.. Rocket.Chat? Mattermost? Matrix? (Score:1)
There are three viable alternatives to Slack that are pretty much the same thing.
Rocket.chat even offers it's own hosting on a server basis, not a per user basis, making it significantly cheaper.
These guys didn't do any market research before they thought of their idea eh?
Thank you! (Score:2)
Oh, good. Because if there's one thing missing from the world, it's another messaging app.
No Linux client? (Score:2)
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Given that you need to be connected to the internet to use your chat client, why wouldn't you do it as a web client? Seriously, do you have a reason at all?
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Why are we slashvertising? (Score:3)
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Not hard. Make it office computer friendly (Score:2)
We've already seen how Slack is a POS because it consumes resources like nobody's business - they just can't code crap.
I mean, I hated it because it consumed 30% of the CPU - both in the browser and the "app" (which was just a browser on its own), showing me they can't code for the web worth crap.
Doubly so when Discord I can have it open in a browser and it idles at 0%.
So all you need to do is make it friendly on lower end machines and consume few resources and you will wonder how Slack gets away with their