Dive Brief:
- Slack plans to introduce threaded messaging sometime in the next quarter, according to Walt Mossberg's interview with CEO Stewart Butterfield.
- Threaded messaging would allow users to discuss a single topic without interrupting the primary discussion, said Butterfield.
- The messaging startup has been prototyping threaded messages internally, Butterfield said, and is working to find a solution that avoids additional clutter in the messaging service.
Dive Insight:
Email is seen as inflexible, old-fashioned, and there’s way too much of it. The average person receives more than 100 emails per day, and the average corporate employee receives more than 200. But replacing email has proven to be more difficult than expected. Several apps have been introduced in an attempt to send email to its grave, but few organizations have completely ditched email.
Slack is working to disrupt—or even entirely replace—email and the basic functions it offers, from interoffice communication to sending attachments.
A threaded message displays both sides of a messaging conversation on one screen in "nested clusters." This way, users could take single topics of discussion outside of Slack's main feed. The key for Slack is finding a threaded messaging solution that doesn't interrupt the flow of conversation, which is akin to a chat room.
Slack is one of only a few companies that has made any headway in the interoffice messaging space. Earlier this month, the company said its recent round of funding raised $200 million at a nearly $4 billion valuation. In just a year, the company's user count and paid seats increased three and a half times. As of April 1, Slack had 2.7 million daily active users and 800,000 paid seats. With corporate customers like NASA, LinkedIn and Spotify, the company is continuing to take off with enterprises and now has total funding of $540 million.
