Flowdock, the messenger for teams, has been made with some razor bleeding edge technologies. Cassandra in the back end, HTML5 on the front with comet in between. Built to run in the browser, you can use Flowdock on any modern computer. However, there are things some might consider shortcomings when it comes to using Flowdock in the browser. That’s why we’ve provided a new guide for running Flowdock on the desktop as an SSB using Fluid or Prism.

» Jump to the Guide (OS X, Windows, Linux)

So, what exactly are the benefits of running Flowdock on the desktop?

Notifications

When used on the desktop, Flowdock uses native desktop notifications to show you what is happening in your flow. This way, you stay up-to-date with no delay.

App of its own

You get a cool Flowdock icon on your desktop, and with Fluid. A cool way of visualizing what you’ve missed, are the unread badges in OS X, which Flowdock supports.

Teamwork needs work. With Flowdock, it’s as simple as having a chat.
Flowdock keeps your team organized and up-to-date with no effort.
It is a powerful team messenger web app.

The biggest day so far is upon us. We Shipped! Right now anybody can march to www.flowdock.com, click the ‘Sign Up for Beta‘ button and start accelerating their team. The hordes of new users gave us some server trouble and signup is now temporarily disabled.

A total of 650 teams from all over the world took part in Private Beta, and we got tons of feedback. Here’s what some have said about Flowdock.

“It’s what Google Wave should have been”

If you want to see more, just see what people are saying about Flowdock on Twitter.

The Genius

During the past few days we’ve shown some awesome uses for Flowdock. Here’s a quick recap.

Minimalist Meetings

Teamwork needs work. Flowdock attempts to minimize the amount of that work.

TODOs are conversation

These days there’s about a zillion ways to manage TODOs online. With Flowdock, the unique
aspect is that you can handle them right in the middle of the conversation.

Agile Development with Flowdock

As an agile software development shop, we test extensively and practice continuous integration.

Handle feedback with Flowdock

How to be as responsive and communicative as possible towards your users.

Track your brands with Flowdock

Make your team act as a single unit in tracking, creating, molding,
protecting and generally managing your brand.

Teamwork needs work. Flowdock attempts to minimize the amount of that work. The promise is: Keep your team up-to-date with no effort.

That means Flowdock reduces the need for meetings. In a good team, members know what the others are doing at all times. A good team does not constantly feel the need to have meetings.

When done right, an efficient meeting can be useful. There are a couple of things in specific that are required for a good meeting. Flowdock can give you them.

The Agenda

With Flowdock, you can collect the agenda just like you collect any list on Flowdock. We use the #agenda tag to gather things we need to go through during our weekly “administrative” meeting. Just like I showed you in my last post about handling todo lists in Flowdock, the lists form naturally from the path of the conversation.

Flowser gives us the complete agenda. We just tick out the #agenda tag off the items as we go through them.

On meeting day, there are rarely many additions or other surprises from attendees who “haven’t seen the agenda”, since on any given moment

• anybody can contribute to the agenda
• the agenda is right there for everyone to see

Track and stay organized

The second most important thing in a great meeting is efficient tracking of action points (or todos) and when needed, separate note taking.

We track todos the same way in and outside of meetings. We often go through the todos in these meetings to make sure they are progressing and to address any potential problems.

We don’t keep separate notes about these meetings. We keep notes all the time by tagging things in Flowdock. A meeting isn’t a special opportunity to be organized for a half an hour. With Flowdock, staying organized all the time is as easy as chat.

Public beta opens tomorrow!

A good way to start the work week is to go through some TODOs. These days there’s about a zillion ways to manage them online. With Flowdock, the unique aspect is that you can handle them right in the middle of the conversation. There is no gap.

Here’s an example from our own flow. If you come up with something, that needs doing you can just throw in a line with the #todo tag included.

But because this is a conversation, if someone else says something worth TODOing, you can just add the tag yourself if the other person didn’t realize to do so.

The todo list lives in Flowser as a search. You can use other tags to better categorize the todo items: milestones, project names etc. Whenever you complete a task, just tick the x on the todo tag to remove it.

This is a lightweight process, which you can work with in the privacy of your own team’s conversation.

Only 2 days till Flowdock public beta!

As Flowdock enters public beta (opens on March 10th!) we’ve begun doing continuous deployment. As an agile software development shop, we also test extensively and practice continuous integration. At the same time we need to monitor that Flowdock is running smoothly and when problems occur, we can fix them right away. All this requires fast working channels of communication so in the center of it as the hub of our team, is naturally Flowdock. I’ll walk you through our development process from the developer’s point of view.

Committing changes

We use git for version control. Each time someone pushes commits to a branch, an email is sent to Flowdock with tagged information on

• commits that were pushed (committer, commit message…)
• component and branch, into which was pushed

This lets us do real-time code reviews. We habitually discuss individual commits inside Flowdock. We use a git post-receive hook to pipe the changes into Flowdock via email. The hook is available here as a gist on GitHub.

Continuous integration

Whenever someone pushes some changes into the master branch, our continuous integration server runs all the unit tests in the project and if they do not pass, an alerting email, such as the one above, is sent to our flow. The message comes with details on who to blame so others can target the correct amount of mocking towards the culprit.

Continuous Deployment

When the tests pass, the master branch is then deployed to our QA environment.
All deployments send properly tagged messages to our flow in Flowdock. I can always tell what was deployed:

• component: front end, back end, specific service…
• environment: production, qa…
• changes: log of commits the deployment brings into the environment

The QA deployment runs acceptance tests, which make sure all the important use cases function properly in a production-like environment. For acceptance tests, we use a combination of Cucumber, Selenium and RSpec. Once everything passes in QA, the deployed version is tagged a suitable candidate for production deployment. Next we do some smoke testing in QA, and finally deploy to production.

Flowdock also gives me a deployment log. For example to see front end deployments in production, I just search #deploy #production #frontend in Flowser.

Exception notifications

Whenever something goes wrong in production, we get notifications to our flow. This way we can debug problems together, immediately when they occur.

6 Days to public beta!

We try to be as responsive and communicative as possible towards our users because they are our future customers (fingers crossed), and they provide incredibly valuable customer feedback.

We try to give our customers enough ways to give us feedback, so they don’t have to sweat it. They can use a feedback form inside Flowdock flows, use our Uservoice page or send us email directly to team@flowdock.com. Some users choose to use Twitter for feedback and they catch our attention by mentioning @flowdock. All this means we need to track different mediums. Luckily enough, Flowdock gives us everything we need, in real time.

Emails and Twitter

In this example from the Tour, you can see how we handle feedback from emails and tweets.

• Responsiveness comes easily when the whole team can respond to the feedback
• All feedback form emails have the tag #feedback in their subject, so they get correctly tagged
• We have forwarded all the emails to team@flowdock.com to our development flow as well, so it’s easy to answer to them and track them in Influx
• Live, face-to-face feedback we just type into the chat and tag it with the same #feedback tag

With these practices, all the feedback is easily accessible when we need it.

Uservoice

Uservoice is a great way of sourcing and managing ideas and suggestions from the user community. The team gets notified about all changes in Uservoice as well. It’s great to talk over new feature requests inside our flow right away when they’re suggested. Then we tag them further and they become part of our backlog. That is agile.

7 days to Flowdock public beta on March 10th!

Flowdock has been designed to be the best group messenger in the world, but it can be so much more. We’ve previously covered using tags to abolish the barrier of reporting bugs, and now I’ll show how you can make your team act as a single unit in tracking, creating, molding, protecting and generally managing your brand.

Flowdock allows your team to react to everything with zero delay. You can pipe anything into Flowdock’s Influx as RSS feeds, tweets or emails. Here’s a couple of things we’ve found immensely useful in tracking our brands. You should try them out.

Add Twitter tracking for your brand

This is basic functionality of Influx in Flowdock.

1. Go to Influx and select sources from the top right

2. Choose the Twitter tab and add your brands as Twitter searches

3. React with zero delay

Add Google Alerts for your brand

1. Go to Google Alerts and add alerts (RSS) with your brand names as search terms

Choose “Feed” in the “Deliver to” selection.

2. Copy the alert’s feed address from Google Alerts

3. Add the feed to Influx through the sources dialog

4. See what the internet says about your brand, and discuss it in Flowdock

Flowdock is completely real-time, and so will your team be once you start using it.

8 days left till public beta on March 10th!

Flowdock was built to be the best group messenger in the world. It must be true, because it says so right on the About page of our new web page! That’s right, we’ve launched our website at www.flowdock.com and in ten days on March 10th, we’ll launch Flowdock to open public beta.

The new version of Flowdock has just been deployed and the 500 companies participating in private beta are already using it.

Here are some highlights of new stuff.

All those flows

Up till now, we’ve wanted to fine tune and get all the customer feedback on the user interface of the flow user experience, so we didn’t even provide anything else in private beta. However, Flowdock is not about only the one flow. You need to use different workspaces for different projects. Here is the new view for that, which we’ve endearingly named “My Flows”

Tour

We’ve added a tour to the web page. There’s already a few use cases on it, and we’ll be adding more as we get closer to the public beta launch. Here’s one such case demonstrating how a law firm uses Flowdock to collect various kinds of information about their competitors and clientele.