Slack

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About

Slack is a messaging app favored by workplaces as a means for coworkers to communicate and collaborate on projects. It has become one of the most popular apps for professionals and is regularly referenced online.

History

Slack is an acronym for "Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge."^[1] It was created by Stewart Butterfield, Eric Costello, Cal Henderson, and Serguei Mourachov of Slack Technologies and launched in August of 2013. Using a "freemium" business model, Slack is free to access but paying members have access to thousands of archived messages. The company was hacked over the course of four days in February of 2015, causing some users' data to be compromised. Slack is compatible with Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, and Commodore 64. On December 29th, 2015, the Slack YouTube channel posted a commercial that gained over 15 million views (shown below).

Features

Slack offers features including private chats organized by topic, helping change it from a means of mostly professional communication to a chatting app similar to Facebook Messenger. It has integrated several different apps including Google Drive, Dropbox, GitHub, Runescope and others. One of the apps is "Memetizer"^[5] which allows for the creation of memes one can use in conversation.

Reception and Online Presence

Slack has been praised and derided by critics. New York Magazine wrote that Slack has an addictive quality, calling it "a compulsion, a distraction, and a burden … another utility we both rely on and resent." After acquiring 8,000 users at launch, Slack has grown to have over 8 million daily users, 3 million of which have paid accounts.

June 2018 Outage

On June 27th, 2018, Slack went down for several hours, leading to a surge of jokes on Twitter among professionals reliant on the platform. User @mike_allton joked about the outage with a Simpsons GIF, gaining over 500 retweets and 1,400 likes (shown below, left). User @brittneyplz posted a GIF from Finding Nemo, gaining over 620 retweets and 2,800 likes (shown below, right). The outage and jokes about it were covered by Twitter Moments,^[2] Chicago Tribune,^[3] and USA Today.^[4]

Mike Allton @mike_allton Follow When #Slack is down and you're a remote worker. GIF 11:32 AM-27 Jun 2018

Brittney Morgan OK C @brittneyplz Follow slack: "oops sorry can't connect" teams who all sit right next to each other but still rely on slack: Now-what? GIF 10:54 AM-27 Jun 2018

Party Parrot

Party Parrot is an emote used on the messaging and collaboration application Slack, featuring a multi-colored, animated depiction of Sirocco the kakapo parrot who was famously filmed mating with zoologist Mark Carwardine's head during an episode of the BBC nature documentary series Last Chance to See. In January 2016, the CultofthePartyParrot website was launched, providing various Party Parrot emojis to download for Slack (shown below).

On June 8th, 2016, the /r/PartyParrot subreddit was launched for discussions related to the Slack emote and BBC video. On July 19th, the Universal Party Parrot Chrome extension was released, enabling Party Parrot tags across all subreddits. On November 10th, Party Parrot emoji keyboards were released on iTunes and the Google Play app stores (shown below, left). In February 2017, a Party Parrot-themed 2048 game was created on the site 2048 Online (shown below, right).