[dvanduzer]

Seems like Slack figured out how to make a lot of money out of interoperable groupware. If they'd been slower at it, I'd still be saying they're an acquisition target for those companies.

edit: "All" they did was come along at the right time and make the interoperability easy. The prerequisites to have done it at all? Smartphones, WebRTC, and ElasticSearch.

[TeMPOraL]

Calling Slack "interoperable" is a bit much to me, though I admit it's better than everyone else in the "new crowd".

I wonder if we need a new word for "interoperability in the time of SaaS" - the kind of where SaaSes talk to other SaaSes via locked down APIs, under absolute control of the vendor.

[dvanduzer]

I mean, you can call the APIs locked down if you insist, but SaaS is SaaS. Would you count S3 as a locked down API, for example? OpenStack's Swift (and plenty of other products) will emulate it. I chose the term "interoperable" specifically instead of "API compatible" but I agree this gets very confusing when talking about SaaS.

In order to do what Slack is doing, they have to be somewhat committed to open standards. They are just doing webhooks, like GitHub does. We tried specifying microformats, and we tried specifying webhooks, but the "loose RPC" model... Seems to work way better than XMPP server interoperability ever has.

I recommend this recent nested Twitter ("new crowd") thread amongst Stewart Butterfield and many other early web folk, about whether Slack is a web app: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/961704310613491712