When listening to my interview with Philip Rosedale, where he talks about creating a virtual world-meets-Slack for distributed work groups, here's a fun irony worth keeping in mind: Slack itself was originally created... in order to create a virtual world. Specifically, Stewart Butterfield's web-based world Glitch. As he told me back in 2011:
“[Glitch] is a game, and not a total open virtual world. There are some tools for creative expression now and more will be added, but anything which would count as ‘user-generated content’ will have to fit within the constraints of the game (without the constraints, there's no game left). So, much of that will be visual customizations (to avatars, houses, locations, etc.) and some of it will be ‘other’ stuff (the non-visual: collaborative music making, player-created games, etc.)”
His development team for Glitch was based around the globe, so they needed a unified communication channel where they could work together, and that's the seed of what eventually became Slack, after the small but much-loved world closed down:
Butterfield transitioned some of Tiny Speck’s staff, alongside some hard-learned lessons about onboarding new users to build a commercial communication tool that Tiny Speck had used to build Glitch. Last August [2014], Slack was launched as an “email killer” and a way to transform how businesses talk and do work together.
With 10 million daily users and a valuation of nearly $17 billion, Slack has succeeded as a work platform far more than Glitch could have likely succeeded as a virtual world. And if Philip and team succeed at creating a valuable virtual world for work, it's almost inevitable it'll be integrated into Slack. (If not bought by Slack outright.)
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.