Flowdock is a real-time collaboration web app directed to teams. It allows co-workers to work together closely and coexist in the same space within their browser. Right now it’s going through an alpha stage where some 10 companies are trying it out and giving feedback.
The public beta is to be expected later this year. Before that we want to share some of the ways of using Flowdock with you. Today I’ll show you some ways to use one of the coolest features in Flowdock, tagging.
Lowering the barrier
We’ve noticed that lots of useful content is generated in instant Messaging, e-mail, Twitter and other medias. In a couple of minutes it may be totally forgotten, because it’s in no-one’s interest to structure that data to a wiki page, or even worse, to a Word document.
Imagine if logging a simple bug would mean just writing a short description to your group chat and ending the line with a #bug hashtag? With Flowdock’s team chat, that’s exactly how it works.
Tags can be added as hashtags or afterwards with a separate UI by anyone in your team. This helps you to ensure that all relevant content is tagged properly.
Information always accessible
All tagged content, including chat, files, content from e-mails etc. can be found using Flowser, an app-in-app of Flowdock for information management. When a bug is closed, for example, the user can simply remove the #bug tag.
When I’m looking for a screenshot of Flowdock for a blog post, I’m going to open Flowser and search for #screenshot. If I wanted to find screenshots only about our future promo site, I could just search for #screenshot #promo.
All this has truly changed our way of working. Now I’ll never forget who’s managing contracts at one of our customers, because that information is tagged in our flow. And tagging that information didn’t cost me anything.
Cool! I’m currently working on my master’s thesis about content annotation in Kassi service (http://kassi.sizl.org) and I have been thinking that some kind of tagging will be needed in Kassi also. What I have not yet finalized is how it should be done in the user interface, but reading this certainly made me think that just inserting tags with # in front of them (like in Twitter and apparently in Flowdock) could be a handy way of doing that. At least it could be allowed as one possible way of tagging content.
Flowdock seems very interesting, I’m eager to see the beta!