Every job I've held for 20 years has involved keeping a chat window open with my collaborators. At various times it was IRC, Jabber, AIM, iChat, HipChat; but now Slack is suddenly the one worth a jillion dollars.

The tooling and ecosystem around Slack are quite different than any of the others. (Admittedly I don't follow the IRC space much.)

It's like gluing a phone running iMessage to your computer screen. Useful for quick collaboration where emails can be clunky, interrupt flow, and inhibit dialogue. There's room for both tools depending on the needed communication medium.

Is it useful? Yes. Is it necessary? No. Could it replace email? No. What is the service worth? A lot, according to starving investors.

I've noticed a lot of business/corporate people really don't "get" slack the same way an older person is bewildered by something like snapchat. We have a "legacy" (for lack of a better term) Lync system that they are holed up in and the split along those lines is very noticeable. Those same type of people who are on the teams firmly on the slack side tend to stay offline until they get an email notification, answer the mention or DM and then disappear again.

> the same way an older person is bewildered by something like snapchat.

Damn. At just (now) 35, I'm apparently an "older person".

/me pours another glass of bourbon

31 and feeling the same. Snapchat is the most effective generation splitter I've ever seen

I wrote a blog post about my experience with Snapchat. Not even being a creator, just a story consumer.

Watched some great thought provoking snaps. The fact that I could neither share the video nor watch the snaps on my own schedule drove me crazy.

So I deleted the app from my phone.