I'd be curious to see how many companies would actually allow a 3rd party service to have that full amount of permissions. It's sort of like GitHub and how some services require the access to private repos. I'm not sure of a solution, but am just curious how it really holds back awesome services like this when companies don't feel comfortable giving it the level of access it has to have (but may not use that full access).
The OAuth scopes operator asks for are the following: chat:write:bot - so we can post to your channel operator's response. commands - to install the commands. users:read - so we can get a bit more information about you (name, team permissions, etc).
We even toyed with the idea of eliminating the "users:read" to be as minimally invasive as possible.
We use Slack in a company of ~30, and while all the devs could easily use IRC, most of the rest of the company would struggle with it, and certainly wouldn't be able to communicate in the wide variety of ways (uploaded files, images/gifs, videos, code snippets, etc) that they do now. Slack is great at making all those rich media types 'just work', and while it was possible with plugins to some IRC clients, the UX was prohibitively bad in my experience.
I've often toyed with the idea of writing an IRCD with logging built in that drops all CTCP setup messages, but it's a huge hassle.
Slack, Hipchat and others however can be easily set up and used by pretty much anyone in a company. IRC is great for companies which only have very technically proficient employees, however that's not most companies...
The company I work for uses Slack and I like it a lot. However, I've never found myself wishing that I could get a stock quote (or do a trade!), map an address, or play hangman there. Similarly, I think I could do a lot of that stuff from Emacs, but I never have. I use Emacs to edit text and I use Slack to chat.
It might be because of the number of times I've been burned by plugins that break after I upgrade the host application, but I'm a little conservative when it comes to extensions and plugins. I tend to stick to default settings. The Slack instance we use has only one integration enabled - Giphy (animated gif responses).
For the people here that are excited about this, is there a function in particular that is a killer function for you?
Don't see how this lives as part of the Slack ecosystem. Maybe their goal is to become standalone.
https://developer.atlassian.com/blog/2015/12/going-way-beyon...
There are too many chat clients around and far too many methods to communicate period. Aggregation is badly needed.
When it was AIM/YIM/MSN, etc, Trillian and Pidgin came in and made the experience usable. Now its Gchat, Telegram, Hipchat and Slack. Some of these have XMPP interfaces (all?) but frankly both companies will keep their APIs as closed as possible because they want to make money on their own platform.
- http://google.github.io/material-design-icons/#icon-font-for...
