My wife and I use slack. In the past ~6 months we: got engage, planned a wedding, a wedding reception (2 different dates), honeymoon to Australia, a baby, a new house, and renting out our townhome.
While slack is really a gussied up messaging platform, the extra polish they have on things like search, pins, and documents, made planning and executing on 3 of lifes major milestones significantly easier to manage.
So far we use only a couple of integrations: google calendar, and a custom build slash-command that pushes events to IFTTT's Google calendar event reciepe.
Side question : anybody here using some sort of hosted family social network ? I'm thinking about doing that. We have a huge family (around 200 alive members who are connected in real life) and thought about installing something, with a facebook/g+ login with oauth. I thought about maybe a wordpress + budypress thing but.. maybe I'm missing something better ?
The first requirement is that anybody must select his parents, so that an ancestry tree can be created, etc...
Our extended family have been using Path for some years (https://path.com). It's private so even young children can post, no ads, very slick app. It doesn't support albums but posting pictures is easy.
Not sure about their business model, I would pay for the privacy and safety angle.
Wow, is this relevant to me!
While my family is only 3 of us, I am quite content using a private (and self-hosted) social network. I ended up using Gnu Social (http://gnu.io/social/).
Here are the reasons for wanting a private network:
* Wanted to teach my young daughter how to behave and what to be prepared for (i.e. cyber bullying) while utilizing social media...BUT...In a safe environment before going out and facebooking with her friends and such. I think of this environment as my daughter's staging social network before she deploys to production. ;-)
* Wanted to talk with my wife via private mechanisms that aren't as easily mined for data. Signal (the app) has actually replaced this need quite nicely: https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal . But its nice to know we can still use our private social network for private conversations. Though admit my stack is absolutely no match for NSA-type intrusions.
* Wanted to keep MY OWN ARCHIVES of a timeline of important family events. If i lose an important photo/note, its on me, and I don't have to rely on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Challenges I faced (and you might want to consider):
* My daughter is already getting fed mis-information from her (air-headed) young friends that facebook, twitter and the like are the only social networks in existence (or the only ones that matter in their eyes). It took some teaching to inform my young daughter that the web is open, and that Daddy can manage our very own network, thank you very much. ;-)
* My wife has a habit of relying on conventional text messaging - she is by no means a tech guru, so tends to forget that we have our own social network and text messaging isn't needed between us 3.
* All the usual challenges that come with self-hosting stuff: uptime/availability, software updates, maintenance, etc. are your responsibility. Like spider man's uncle Ben said: with great power comes responsibility.
Here's some info which may help you decide what would work best for your scenario (understanding i don;t know what your skills or expected time investments are):
* I tested out Friendica - which was pretty straight-forward to install (just simple PHP stack) but seemed a little cumbersome to use. To be clear, it does alot out of the box, though now thinking, maybe it was too much GUI, widgets, etc. for my small family...And, what I needed was simple service, like a private twitter. I am interested when the red matrix project (same originators of Friendica) becomes more mature. Ultimately, i killed this Friendica installation and moved on.
* I tried pump.io, which actually is pretty cool...but because all my stuff is on a small VPS infrasturcutre, pump.io seems to want to be on its own vps...So, to install it on infrastructure that is shared with my personal site, etc. just seemed to consume too much time. i abandoned this - just didn't have time to play sysadmin. Much like red matrix, here's another project that has a bright future (at least i hope). Just understand: pump.io is a protocol and not a single app/server, so until the killer server setup is created (to implement said protocol), I think adoption - for folks who can but don';t have time to play sysadmin - might be slower than it could be. By the way, from the mobile client perspective, I played around one of the more popular clients: Impeller (http://impeller.e43.eu), which actually worked really well. Before I setup my own test server, i tried it on another person's server (that opened up public registrations) and found impeller to be pretty fast/nimble.
* Finally, I installed and have been using Gnu Social for many, many months now. The install was a simple php stack, some-what straight-forward. The only annoying thing is that the documentation - at last months ago - was slightly inconsistent between website and what gets downloaded with installation bundle. But in actually once that inconsistency was surpassed, the install scripts work pretty well. It was the simplest of the installs compared to the platforms i referenced above. An important point: what actually kept me on this platform so far has been the mobile client (an app called &status: http://andstatus.org). While the platform itself seems pretty solid (I can't speak to scaling issues, considering I have only 3 users!). But this mobile client is pretty freaking fast/nimble; and i don't think its my little VPS! There was another client called mustard which worked ok too. I suppose because the underlying platform is decent enough, but the clients really shine here. In this case, with my wife being more used to native styles of text messaging apps, &status really helped with her adoption. In any case, Gnu social is what i have been running with, and so far so good.
There are many other options (buddycloud, diaspora, etc.) which i did not try, but which might be quite worthwhile depending on your use-cases.
Pitching my own company here: https://www.cloudron.io . Cloudron is a smartserver that lets you run web apps. You can add users in the web ui and users can access all the apps that you install on the server. https://cloudron.io/appstore.html has the app listing (rocket.chat, owncloud, ghost) to name a few.
I've been working on something, just specs right now, to handle just that scenario. Something I'll have open source. It is a problem and not a small one.
Seems like a great use of Slack. Unfortunately, my first and only experience with Slack has not been a fantasy. I joined a public slack on startups and everytime I check, I'm 100+ messages behind. Seems like a giant chat room.
Does anyone have a favorite "Shared Family Calendar"? We need something to keep track of everyone's school schedule, reports/projects due, sports games/practices, etc. etc.
I've tried Google and Trello ... wondering if there's something better.
What does Google not do? In our family of 4 everyone has their own calendar and there are a couple of other shared ones that we can all see, and it works great.
As a B2B SaaS app founder I dream of the day when our app generates this type of positive, organic coverage so effortlessly. It's no wonder Slack are growing at such a rate, they've built something that provides a serious amount of value to people.
1. Whenever you catch yourself thinking that something uncommon is effortless, you're probably not seeing what's going on behind the scenes. Or at least– getting to the point when you've set the flywheel in motion (and people are trying to use your product or idea as a centerpiece for discussing something of their own) is non-trivial! But I'm sure you know this.
2. There are B2B SaaS apps that provide a serious amount of value that grow nicely, but still don't grow as quickly as Slack does– Slack is kind of an outlier in this regard.
I also wanted to setup something like this but I did not see an option to switch languages in Slack and since no-one speaks any English, it's not going to work well...
Right now my wife and I just use Google calendar and iMessage, but I can see a time soon when my child can speak, read and type where it might be handy to have a group chat.
Although reading this now I wonder if it would be handy to have this for my in-laws who all live in the area, since right now we all have to coordinate via email.
But how would you deal with losing history? 10K messages is not very many.
I've been using gmail/gtalk for ~12 years -- I can quickly dig up (and regularly do) pretty much anything my parents and I ever talked about. I consider this to be the killer feature (vs, say, hotmail, where I had to keep deleting messages because of the 10MB limit, back in the day).
If you haven't already, shared photo albums on iOS are a really great way to share baby pics with family members without overwhelming your Instagram feeds or having to email all of the time.
I have long held that IM (in particular MSN Messenger) was what killed community usage of IRC.
Before XP shipped with Messenger bundled, and aggressively pushed (i recall you would get a big window in your face on first login "demanding" you set up an account), basically everyone with a net connection in the local area was found on one or more regional channels.
After IM came however, things became very "cliche-y" as people were "approving" each other over IM and then dropping off IRC.
Smiled as I read this, seeing as I'm on Slack largely due to my "extended family" from my previous job (everyone else left but we stayed in touch over Slack).
[+] [-] _b8r0|10 years ago|reply
[1] - https://github.com/cantino/huginn/
[+] [-] cableshaft|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bedros|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jklinger410|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lfx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] erikbigelow|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balls187|10 years ago|reply
While slack is really a gussied up messaging platform, the extra polish they have on things like search, pins, and documents, made planning and executing on 3 of lifes major milestones significantly easier to manage.
So far we use only a couple of integrations: google calendar, and a custom build slash-command that pushes events to IFTTT's Google calendar event reciepe.
[+] [-] ritonlajoie|10 years ago|reply
Side question : anybody here using some sort of hosted family social network ? I'm thinking about doing that. We have a huge family (around 200 alive members who are connected in real life) and thought about installing something, with a facebook/g+ login with oauth. I thought about maybe a wordpress + budypress thing but.. maybe I'm missing something better ? The first requirement is that anybody must select his parents, so that an ancestry tree can be created, etc...
[+] [-] wnscooke|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chappi42|10 years ago|reply
what about sandstorm.io, rocket chat (and there are more apps which may fit) ?
[+] [-] mamp|10 years ago|reply
Not sure about their business model, I would pay for the privacy and safety angle.
[+] [-] visakanv|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aneeshnl|10 years ago|reply
(Its available as apt-get install in debian unstable)
[+] [-] mxuribe|10 years ago|reply
Here are the reasons for wanting a private network: * Wanted to teach my young daughter how to behave and what to be prepared for (i.e. cyber bullying) while utilizing social media...BUT...In a safe environment before going out and facebooking with her friends and such. I think of this environment as my daughter's staging social network before she deploys to production. ;-) * Wanted to talk with my wife via private mechanisms that aren't as easily mined for data. Signal (the app) has actually replaced this need quite nicely: https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal . But its nice to know we can still use our private social network for private conversations. Though admit my stack is absolutely no match for NSA-type intrusions. * Wanted to keep MY OWN ARCHIVES of a timeline of important family events. If i lose an important photo/note, its on me, and I don't have to rely on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Challenges I faced (and you might want to consider): * My daughter is already getting fed mis-information from her (air-headed) young friends that facebook, twitter and the like are the only social networks in existence (or the only ones that matter in their eyes). It took some teaching to inform my young daughter that the web is open, and that Daddy can manage our very own network, thank you very much. ;-) * My wife has a habit of relying on conventional text messaging - she is by no means a tech guru, so tends to forget that we have our own social network and text messaging isn't needed between us 3. * All the usual challenges that come with self-hosting stuff: uptime/availability, software updates, maintenance, etc. are your responsibility. Like spider man's uncle Ben said: with great power comes responsibility.
Here's some info which may help you decide what would work best for your scenario (understanding i don;t know what your skills or expected time investments are):
* I tested out Friendica - which was pretty straight-forward to install (just simple PHP stack) but seemed a little cumbersome to use. To be clear, it does alot out of the box, though now thinking, maybe it was too much GUI, widgets, etc. for my small family...And, what I needed was simple service, like a private twitter. I am interested when the red matrix project (same originators of Friendica) becomes more mature. Ultimately, i killed this Friendica installation and moved on.
* I tried pump.io, which actually is pretty cool...but because all my stuff is on a small VPS infrasturcutre, pump.io seems to want to be on its own vps...So, to install it on infrastructure that is shared with my personal site, etc. just seemed to consume too much time. i abandoned this - just didn't have time to play sysadmin. Much like red matrix, here's another project that has a bright future (at least i hope). Just understand: pump.io is a protocol and not a single app/server, so until the killer server setup is created (to implement said protocol), I think adoption - for folks who can but don';t have time to play sysadmin - might be slower than it could be. By the way, from the mobile client perspective, I played around one of the more popular clients: Impeller (http://impeller.e43.eu), which actually worked really well. Before I setup my own test server, i tried it on another person's server (that opened up public registrations) and found impeller to be pretty fast/nimble.
* Finally, I installed and have been using Gnu Social for many, many months now. The install was a simple php stack, some-what straight-forward. The only annoying thing is that the documentation - at last months ago - was slightly inconsistent between website and what gets downloaded with installation bundle. But in actually once that inconsistency was surpassed, the install scripts work pretty well. It was the simplest of the installs compared to the platforms i referenced above. An important point: what actually kept me on this platform so far has been the mobile client (an app called &status: http://andstatus.org). While the platform itself seems pretty solid (I can't speak to scaling issues, considering I have only 3 users!). But this mobile client is pretty freaking fast/nimble; and i don't think its my little VPS! There was another client called mustard which worked ok too. I suppose because the underlying platform is decent enough, but the clients really shine here. In this case, with my wife being more used to native styles of text messaging apps, &status really helped with her adoption. In any case, Gnu social is what i have been running with, and so far so good.
There are many other options (buddycloud, diaspora, etc.) which i did not try, but which might be quite worthwhile depending on your use-cases.
Good luck!
[+] [-] gramakri|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sosuke|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chermanowicz|10 years ago|reply
That's crazy (awesome).
[+] [-] veritas20|10 years ago|reply
I'm missing the magic.
[+] [-] kingnight|10 years ago|reply
I'm surprised that the web api is trivial enough to script but would love to use it.
[+] [-] spinningarrow|10 years ago|reply
That is actually really cool. Are there any privacy concerns though?
[+] [-] filipm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joallard|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xmlninja|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callmeed|10 years ago|reply
I've tried Google and Trello ... wondering if there's something better.
[+] [-] petepete|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julianz|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eddieplan9|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeena|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeremyw|10 years ago|reply
https://github.com/jeremywohl/moviebot
[+] [-] simonswords82|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] visakanv|10 years ago|reply
1. Whenever you catch yourself thinking that something uncommon is effortless, you're probably not seeing what's going on behind the scenes. Or at least– getting to the point when you've set the flywheel in motion (and people are trying to use your product or idea as a centerpiece for discussing something of their own) is non-trivial! But I'm sure you know this.
2. There are B2B SaaS apps that provide a serious amount of value that grow nicely, but still don't grow as quickly as Slack does– Slack is kind of an outlier in this regard.
3. There's a predictable news cycle that these things go through: https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-n... Within this model, Slack is currently between 4 and 6 o' clock. This will change, inevitably.
[+] [-] jalada|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] splatcollision|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] realusername|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlunkr|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spinningarrow|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] luckydata|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oldgun|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ergo14|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jedberg|10 years ago|reply
Although reading this now I wonder if it would be handy to have this for my in-laws who all live in the area, since right now we all have to coordinate via email.
[+] [-] rekoros|10 years ago|reply
I've been using gmail/gtalk for ~12 years -- I can quickly dig up (and regularly do) pretty much anything my parents and I ever talked about. I consider this to be the killer feature (vs, say, hotmail, where I had to keep deleting messages because of the 10MB limit, back in the day).
[+] [-] stevesearer|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidbrent|10 years ago|reply
It made me very nostalgic for my old IRC friends, both people and eggdrop bots alike.
[+] [-] digi_owl|10 years ago|reply
Before XP shipped with Messenger bundled, and aggressively pushed (i recall you would get a big window in your face on first login "demanding" you set up an account), basically everyone with a net connection in the local area was found on one or more regional channels.
After IM came however, things became very "cliche-y" as people were "approving" each other over IM and then dropping off IRC.
[+] [-] guillegette|10 years ago|reply
Disclaimer: I built it :)
[+] [-] simpixelated|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcarmo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephenitis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fjallstrom|10 years ago|reply