I’ve done the impossible. I’ve moved my family to Slack. After seeing a post making the rounds on twitter a few months ago about moving their family to Slack I decided that I’d try it.
There were a number of different motivations for this:
- I no longer use Skype since it’s a useless piece of crap these days, this limits my ability to text chat with my Dad.
- James doesn’t use Skype much either.
- My mum doesn’t have any other chat system other than text.
- I don’t speak anywhere near as much as I should to James.
- Slack is rolling out voice chat and will be adding video chat in the future.
- We have a family google calendar now so it’d be nice to have that integrated.
- It can work across wifi and mobile data, has decent mobile and desktop apps.
I fired out an email gauging interest from my close family and the response was great, my mum and brother were the first to say yes to it, then I think my mum forced my dad onto it!
At the moment I’ve integrated our family calendar and created a Hubot instance which I plan on adding to in the future.
Over the past few days it’s worked out really well and we’ve already been using it to organise family events and a ski trip next year. Even though our family is spread across the UK it feels like we’ve never been closer.
The only downside is that James girlfriend doesn’t have and Android or iOS phone so she’s a bit out of the loop with this. Maybe Slack will create a blackberry app soonish.