Why Join? (An Impassioned Essay)

Friends, family and colleagues, you're seeing this because I think you're special. For the last couple of years, I've been teaching myself media-related skills, like working with audio, video, the web, social media, writing, and much, much more. I'm really interested in being creative and working with existing friends, as well as making new ones.

The reason I started this website, UnwindMedia.com, is that I wanted a place where creative projects I work on could live, and to put my design skills to the test in the real world. We have a couple of reasonably successful projects on the site now, and growing even better is a big goal of mine.

To help me and my friends out with that, last spring I started using an application called Slack. Some of you will undoubtedly already be familiar with this application, as I've described it in some detail to several of you. This program, which has a web interface, desktop apps, and mobile apps, helps groups of people with similar interests to collaborate and communicate better.

You're reading this right now because I think we can mutually benefit from you joining the Slack team I have set up for Unwind Media and my friends. I think that Slack combines the best aspects of programs like Facebook Messenger and Groups, Google Hangouts, and SMS or email, making it very easy to keep in touch, and to keep track of different conversations going on at the same time.

This means that I think Slack is useful not only in making projects like I described above successful, but I think it is also fun and helpful in everyday conversation.

Slack is a pretty straightforward messaging platform that organizes conversations into three distinct types:

• Direct messages: These are conversations between you and one other person, like you'd find on Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, or text messages. If Slack only consisted of this kind of message, it would be much less compelling. Luckily, it's not.
• Channels: These are message threads based on a topic or theme. All members of teams are able to join or leave channels at any time. Channels are great for discussing common interests like #politics, #sports, or even #weekend. Planning events in groups of people is really easy when you don't have to continually create new threads, making sure you don't miss anybody. There are threads for #general discussion and #random conversations too, so everybody can stay in the loop.
• Private groups: This type of chat is analogous to a Facebook Messenger thread with multiple people in it, but much more powerful. We use channels like these on the Unwind Slack team for individual shows that already exist, like ottawhat or futurechat, but unless you're a member of those groups, you won't see messages from them showing up. These are a great way to plan surprises, or to just keep clutter out of more general threads, as it's usually information everybody doesn't need to see. You can have any number of members in a private group, and you can add people to a group at any time.

One big advantage Slack has over the other services I've been comparing it to so far is that you can also tag topics and people in messages, so posting "hey @ma_yyc, go check out the link I just posted in #sports" will actually notify Mike that somebody wants him to go look at something in the sports channel, and all he will have to do is click the #sports link.

Another really cool thing about Slack is that you can connect other services to it, so for instance, you can send paste links from Twitter, Google Drive, or other websites, and they will automatically show you details about the link that's been posted. You can start a video chat by just typing /hangout in a channel. You can type "/giphy sometext" and get an animated GIF based on the text you put in. This is really just the beginning of what the service can do for groups of people wanting to communicate in a really fun and efficient way.

Obviously, asking people to download another app and sign up for another service is pretty tedious, but I promise you it's honestly worth it. I use Slack exclusively with +Mike Attrell now, and we've not looked back. It gets infinitely more fun and useful with more people, so I really hope you'll consider at least trying the app out, on the web and on your phone.

If you want to do something new and creative, get the people you want to work with involved, and I will be excited to get other people on board with the project, and help out in whatever way I can. Honestly, just give it a shot. Remember when you first got Facebook in 2005-06 and were awestruck by how powerful it was in making connections? Now that you have those connections, let's have fun with them! Let me know if there's anybody else you want on the team.