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Slack Buys and Shuts Down Intelligent Email App Astro (engadget.com)
Slack has acquired email app company Astro to incorporate it into Slack channels. As a result, Astro is shutting down its Mac, iOS, Android, Alexa and Slack apps. They're no longer taking new users and existing ones will lose access on October 10th. Engadget reports: The company said that with over 50 million channels created to date, they're increasingly becoming the platform through which teams collaborate. "But we all know that email is still a very important tool in business communication," said Slack. "We've taken some steps to make it possible to integrate email into Slack, but now we're in a position to make that interoperability much simpler and much, much more powerful."
Last year, Astro launched its Astrobot Slack app, which let users manage their emails and check their Office 365 or Google calendars from within Slack. It also allowed them to do one search to pull up results from both Slack and email. "As we explored with Slack how to bring together messaging, email and calendar, it became evident that we would have the biggest impact on workplace communications and realize our original vision by joining Slack," the company said.
Last year, Astro launched its Astrobot Slack app, which let users manage their emails and check their Office 365 or Google calendars from within Slack. It also allowed them to do one search to pull up results from both Slack and email. "As we explored with Slack how to bring together messaging, email and calendar, it became evident that we would have the biggest impact on workplace communications and realize our original vision by joining Slack," the company said.
The more you depend on someone else to do your work, the more they bite you in the ass.
But they didn't "just kill it"
They integrated the functionality in to their own product, then killed it.
I have been using slack since version 1.2.3 (~1993) and now using slackware 14.2!
I can't find that Astro app that you are talking about in my distro. What is it? What does it do?
Anyway, I just chatted with Patrick Volkerding and he says that he hasn't got a clue either! Strange story.
Please enlight me!
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
And what the hell is Slack and why so many stories about it?
for people using cloud services. First Zoho, then Astro.
Impending 365 downtime imminent?
It's like being in a room full of excitable people, all exclaiming OOH, Shiney! all day.
davecb@spamcop.net
It's like basecamp for people smart enough to know IRC is superior but not smart enough to realize you could still just use IRC.
Forums are not quite the same as chat. Though the logging in Matrix, Slack, Skype, and Discord makes it less synchronous and ephemeral than IRC, it's still in practice somewhat more synchronous than something like Slashdot, where multiple-paragraph researched replies are commonplace. In something asynchronous like a threaded or nested forum, you can compose replies to several comments on your lunch break and still be seen as a participant in the discussion. And at least one analyst believes that synchronous communication puts people in minority time zones at an unfair disadvantage ("Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications" by Dave Cheney).
Slackware was the distribution
Slackware is the distribution, it is still active and used by many people.
Anyway seems odd an IRC Client 'clone' needs email, but I guess that is how companies grow these days
Correct, it is crazy. A lot of companies try to duplicate a lot of stuff that already exists in one "web app" or just "app", sometimes using the silliest protocols instead of the existing ones.
I had a chat with a marketing person from our company and she said:
"We are in the modern era, people don't want to open a mail client, an IRC client, etc. We need to have a product that just does it all."
So nowadays, some marketing people find it unacceptable and too complicated to ask people to open and learn how to use clients like, mail, irc, etc. Often, they have a hard time using those clients themselves or worse, they don't even know such things as IRC exists.
It is a general tendency that I have observed lately, many people try to re-invent what already exists and they don't even know it already exists!
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Those who are ignorant of IRC are doomed to reinvent it, badly.
—me, upon learning my employer had, after nuking IRC and switching to Jabber, ditched Jabber for the even steamier and more fragrant pile that is Slack.
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Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
It's a verbatim copy of IRC running of cloud microservices and web protocols controlled by a single company and used by bazillions because it offers unified branding and apps you can install everywhere. Plus it also offers per account per channel per user chat history that carries over (a thing that is a bit sucky to set up in IRC). You can also integrate it into other cloudy stuff implemented in modern microservices, such as Google Docs.
Other than that it's just IRC in shiny. ... Which is where the "Shiny" actually comes in.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Embrace, extend, extinguish
Acquire, add, assassinate.
Buy, build, bomb.