Slackline allows Slack users to share channels

Slack has been in the news recently for its stratospheric growth and mind-blowing valuation: The company raised $120 million in a recent funding round on a post-money valuation of $1.12 billion.

Many of the 30,000-plus companies using the product have inter-company relationships, and would naturally like to intercommunicate. While Slack does not yet provided that capability, some developers already jumped into the gap. Slackline is a service that uses Slack’s API to create cross-team connections for Slack channels. So if company A wants to share a Slack channel — which functions more or less as a chat room — with company B, that can now be accomplished. This is what Dan Strictland calls the Interslack.

Here’s a shared channel in my  Slack account, one I used to connect to Slackline:

Screenshot 2014-12-07 10.29.35

At the top you see where I created the connection between my channel called “#slackline” and the Slackline channel of the same name. Later on you see communications with other participants, including ernesto, the guy behind Slackline, and Dave Notik, who wants to correct the term “socialogy” that I use.

At any rate, I expect Slack will integrate this sort of capability soon. Perhaps it should simply acquire Slackwire.

Joining Slackwire’s community channels is free, but when one beings to create their own account they must pay. The small tier contains five shared channels with a limit of three connected teams to each channel for $29/month. Other plans cost more.

Note that Slack as released a new Mac client that supports logging into different teams (which are domains), but that’s not the same as shared channels, which are much more useful.

 

 

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Stowe Boyd

Stowe Boyd

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