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Slack just fixed its greatest weakness

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Slack

Slack, the fast-growing service that thousands of businesses use to communicate internally, has finally added group messaging.

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In a blog post on Wednesday, Slack announced that it now lets up to 9 people be part of a direct message thread. Previously, these threads were limited to two people.

This is a big deal for Slack users.

See, while Slack is great for team-wide communication (in customizable channels) or person-to-person communication (in direct messages), it was always hard to have a quick private chat with a group of people.

What you had to do in the past was invite people to a private group, and once you were done with the group you would have to disband it or it would just sit there in the side column on the app. This was enough of a burden that people often wouldn't bother having small group conversations.

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With the new update, messaging a couple of people is as easy as messaging just one, and it's easy to hide a conversation from your side bar when you're done with it. As soon as the switch came out, there was a flurry of activity in the Tech Insider office with people disbanding unnecessary private groups and jumping into group direct messages instead.

The new Slack paradigm breaks down like this:

 

  • Public channels for team-wide conversation that anyone can see.
  • Private channels for organized and recurring group conversation that only some people can see.
  • Direct messages for ad hoc private group conversations.
  • Direct messages for private individual conversations.

 

In addition to the old shortcut for switching between conversations (CMD + K on the Mac and CTRL + K on Windows), there's a new shortcut for switching between just direct messages (CMD + Shift + K on the Mac and CTRL + Shift + K on Windows).

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Group direct messages are searchable like public channels in Slack, and each thread's notification preferences can be managed like a normal channel. Unlike public channels, direct message content is only searchable for people in the thread.

 

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