It wasn’t long before they decided to sell to the tech giant, Yahoo! for over $20 million. When they found out that the game had no future financially, they decided to grab that feature and bring it to the world. Now, Flickr used to be a unique photo-sharing feature in a video game that he created called Game Neverending. Including open APIs which are now the norm with future-facing companies. If you remember, Flickr used to be one of the top photo-sharing applications in the early 2000s, and it pioneered a lot of new technologies. They both share a common co-founder, Stewart Butterfield, a visionary who was the master of pivoting. It’s hard to talk about Slack without talking about Flickr.

There was just so much you could do with it, that it revolutionized enterprise communication.Īnd, that’s when it started making waves. It just makes all the difference, especially in business communication.

The search functionality that they have is just bomb. Slack also helped keep track of automation, you could now have the messaging app itself ping you if you for example have a new lead coming through your pipeline. This streamlined a lot of office communications. Say you uploaded a file into Dropbox, it can automatically update a channel on Slack and inform people about the upload, the group can now comment on the file after viewing it within the Slack app.

It was built to be deeply integrated with apps. It was a messaging platform, sure, but it did more than facilitate communication.Īpart from being able to help people in one company chat with each other, it also organized chats in channels, allowed for deep app integration, native file viewing, and unlimited message history. When Slack first came out in 2013, explaining what it did was a little complicated.

Slack technologies eric costello