New Communication Tool, Slack, Launches

Stewart Butterfield, a co-founder of Flickr, has taken his communication tool Slack out of beta and opened it up to the rest of us. So far as I can gather, the idea is that if you’re working with a team (however defined) you might wish to have all your communications in one searchable place, whether they originated as emails or SMS texts. Slack is meant to provide just such an all-purpose communication function. The story in Gigaom will explain it better than I can, because I’ve not had a chance to try it yet.

Functionality depends on subscription level, but there’s a free trial version to get you going.

I can see that enhanced and centralized team communication might appeal to some law firms or departments within firms, but I think that before I abandoned email per se I’d want some kind of serious promise that security would be as high as it can possibly be in this day and age of government wrong-doing.