A couple of days ago, we published full-text search for Flowdock. It was a hit, everyone loved it, but still, the implementation was clearly lacking something.

That’s right,
Not enough flux capacitors!

The situation had to be rectified immediately, so naturally we implemented some and they are now deployed. (If you’re hazy on the DeLorean Time Machine, read more here.)

But what ever does that mean!?

Okay, so you make a search for, let’s say the word precisely. You might get some older results that you don’t have a clear recollection of, for example:

You’re going to be wanting some context. That’s where time travel and the flux capacitors kick in. There’s a link labeled “Show in chat” with a super-cool flux capacitor icon next to it. Clicking the link will take you through time and space to that moment in chat-time and show you exactly what went down.

There’s really nothing better than chat-time travel and 80′s movies depicting the 50′s.

Get your own today!

If you haven’t yet signed up for your own time travel enabled group chat solution (that’s Flowdock), then click here and do it now. Only takes a few seconds.

As a Friday bonus, we’re releasing the flux capacitor icon under a Creative Commons license to be freely used for time travel or other purposes! Click here for the icon package.

Flux Capacitor Icon by Flowdock Ltd is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at blog.nodeta.com.

One of the key things in Flowdock from the very beginning has been to bridge the gap between conversation and knowledge, between a nonchalant talk one Tuesday morning and a fully organized wiki page. This has proved to be a difficult task. The concept that we introduced in Flowdock to solve the problem was tagging. We put tagging in a context where no on else has thought to try it – an ongoing conversation. It’s easy to spot important bits from flowing talk, but the next step, taking that important information and cultivating it into meaningful knowledge, can be laborous. With Flowdock, this step takes you about one second. Add a tag, and you’ve essentially added that piece of information to a labeled list.

For the longest time the only way of finding this content in Flowdock has been to look for them by their tags. Real full-text search has it’s technical problems but the real reason has always been that we wanted people to get acquainted with the idea of tagging parts of a conversation. At the same time, the most wanted feature amongst our user base has been for a long time – that’s right – full-text search. Now it has been implemented.

Introducing Full-Text Search

The search can be used in Flowser, just like searching with tags. The implementation is subtle. The initial UI hasn’t changed a bit. Instead, when you’re making a tag search, in the dropdown list of tags, the last option is an actual full-text search. We think the user experience is pretty smooth.

The results show up really quickly.

Tell us what you think, how it’s working for you. We’ve already realized that this makes the need even more obvious to be able to jump into chat history from the search results. That feature is already underway.

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!