Be Notified

Now, whenever someone mentions your name in a flow that you have open, you’ll hear a pleasant toned-down ble-bling. This is great when you’re too focused on something else to notice that someone needs you in the flow. Or even just to notice that you are being talked about. You can mute and enable the notifications with a single click using a button in the right upper corner of the flow.

Some of you requested for sound notifications whenever a message is posted, but we opted to use the sound notifications for a more important type of situation – someone actually mentioning you by name. If you haven’t already checked the help about visual notifications, do so at http://www.flowdock.com/help/desktop.

If you’d like to comment about this feature, check out the Uservoice thread.

Tell it to @everyone

If you’ve been using Flowdock, you probably know about user tags. It’s a great way to point out any link, file or message to another user in the flow. It’s especially brilliant for assigning a #todo item. Now, we’ve added a special user tag, called @everyone. You can use it in any context just like the other user tags, but instead of just one user noticing the message, it will be highlighted and tagged to all the users in the flow.

And… when you tell something important to @everyone in the chat, even a sound notification will be heard by everyone!

Redesigned Influx sources dialog

Since we launched our public beta, the experience of managing Influx sources hasn’t been as good as it should. Because the sources dialog worked as it should (technically, at least) and we had more urgent things to fix, we left it pretty much untouched. However, as the rest of the user experience became more polished and clean, the old dialog with its many tabs, fields and buttons started to stick out like a sore thumb.

After several iterations of sketching and planning we came up with a design that was dramatically simpler than the old one. Inspired by the multi-function address bars in today’s browsers, we implemented a single text field that works with all source types. Type a Twitter user name, RSS feed address or any keyword you’d like to follow and you’ll get a preview dropdown of all the sources you can add to your flow.

When anybody in the flow adds or removes an Influx source, everyone gets notified of the change so they know what content is coming to their flow without constantly checking the sources view.

Get notified about messages for you

Starting from today you’ll get notified by email about all the chat messages sent to you. Notifications about discussion in your flows pop up in your inbox after a day if you haven’t visited the flow. This is a great way to inform your teammates about important stuff even if they can’t access Flowdock right away.

Pending invitations

Last but not least, we’ve added a list of invited people after the flow members list on the Dashboard. In addition to seeing who has already got an invite, you can also resend the email or cancel the invite completely.

Remember to give feedback!

At Flowdock, we’re always listening to our customers to concentrate our development to the weakest points in our software. We need your feedback to make Flowdock better, so tell us what you think about these new features. To give feedback, you can use the feedback form in the Dashboard, add new ideas to our UserVoice page or email us at team@flowdock.com.

Follow us in Twitter and Facebook to keep track of our latest updates and features!

We had been working on the foundations of Flowdock for about 6 months when Google initially introduced Wave. At first, it was a horrifying moment: Google is known to enter new markets, crushing the existing players. They seemed to have many of the same ideas, and even the concepts (like flow vs. wave) sounded surprisingly familiar.

We are often compared to Wave, although Wave and Flowdock do not bear much resemblance UI-wise.

However, we do share some high-level similarities:

Natural real-time communication. Communication tools say they are real-time, but in Flowdock you can actually feel that you’re solving problems as a team. Any message, be it via chat, e-mail, Twitter or RSS, sent to your team’s flow will appear within a second. That’s the kind of experience you expect but you’re not used to.

Disruptive ideas in text-based communication. Chats have looked the same for 20 years, and even a Facebook-style stream with comments and the likes is not disruptive anymore. Wave had the courage to try things like “everyone can edit anything”, the same way as Flowdock is innovating with the powerful tagging system.

But Wave didn’t die for no reason. It was a splendid protocol engineering exercise, but it was left for the extension developers to find out the use-cases. Without Google’s guidance they sometimes got a bit lost: when I went to Google’s local Wave event aimed at business types they explained how to look up your favorites movies using the IMDB wavebot.

Some design choices were also very confusing. Because everyone was allowed to edit everything, it became very unclear how a discussion actually had evolved. Wave offered a playback feature to work around this problem, but it wasn’t very convenient. A normal person just couldn’t understand what’s happening inside his Wave.

We ended up taking a very different path than Google. Our mission has always been to help teams communicate more efficiently. We don’t solve cross-organizational communication issues, teams are our thing.

Because of our focus, we could actually serve our users much better than other tools. Team compositions are relatively static, meaning that team members could actually share a common categorization – something that wouldn’t be possible in random e-mail threads. This led us to investigate how tags could be used to find the important parts of a discussion.

Eventually Flowdock evolved to be a bridge between communication and knowledge. In Flowdock, a piece of discussion can be turned into a ToDo item. Or a link you shared can be marked as a potential competitor of your company. The team’s internal communication can directly help the team to organize itself, but traditionally communication and knowledge management have been separate issues.

While the product strategy for Wave obviously wasn’t very clear, I think Google certainly did a favor for the online community by showing that there’s still room for innovation in the collaboration field.

Flowdock will continue experimenting with new ways to connect your communication to your typical workflow. There’s some cool stuff coming out in the end of the summer, so stay tuned and follow us on Twitter.

Last weekend we completed a transition from Flowdock’s database of choice, Cassandra, to another NoSQL alternative, MongoDB. Since our technology stack has always generated some interest, I’ll now try to justify our decision in public.

Some of our users might remember this:

At some point we started to have some stability issues with Cassandra. All nodes would go into an infinite loop, running GC and trying to compact the data files – occasionally falling off the cluster. We were unable to solve the problem, except that restarting and then compacting a node usually settled it down for a while. Other people had reported similar problems. Last couple of weeks our Cassandra nodes always ate all the resources they were given, slowing down Flowdock.

This was not the first time we had run into problems because of our bleeding edge database choice. When upgrading from 0.4 to 0.5, we had to shut down the cluster, only to find out that it hadn’t flushed everything to the disk (even though we explicitly flushed it, as instructed). Thus we ended up having a couple of minutes of discussions lost, and our custom-built indices were miserably out of date and needed to be rebuilt. I think it was 4 AM when we finally got to leave the office.

The NoSQL scene has evolved since we made our original decision to go with Cassandra. MongoDB is changing rapidly, and the latest addition of auto-sharding and replica sets made it a compelling alternative to Cassandra. So I decided to give it a try.

It took me a day to write a conversion script for our data. Within a week or so we were able to run Flowdock purely on MongoDB. It was tested internally for a couple of weeks before it was deployed to production.

Now that we have done the change, I’m happy to see that we got some benefits (very well known in most databases) in addition to the performance and reliability characteristics:

1. Smart (multikey) indices. Manually maintaining indices was always tedious, and MongoDB can index everything we need out-of-the-box. For example, our messages have tags, implying a document format like this:

   { content: "Write a blog post about #mongodb.",
     workspace: 'myflow',
     tags: ["mongodb", "todo", "@Otto"] }
   

   Now when looking for my own tasks, Flowdock backend only needs to do this query:

   db.messages.find({
     workspace: 'myflow',
     tags: { $all: ["todo", "@Otto"] }
   })
   

2. Queries. No matter how simple your data model is, every once in a while you need to perform a query that you didn’t plan in advance. MongoDB lets you construct complex queries directly from the console, pretty much like an SQL database. It will then perform a sequential scan, which is still much faster and more convenient than processing millions of rows manually, on the client-side.
3. Map-Reduce. It’s great for stuff like analytics. MongoDB’s Map-Reduce support is not perfect, but at least it’s easy to use.
4. GridFS makes storing our files very easy. The storage capabilities expand together with the rest of our MongoDB cluster.

We have faced only some minor limitations:

1. We found a bug in JSON parsing that got fixed in 10 minutes.
2. Dots are not allowed in BSON document keys. Typically it might not be a problem, but we had to work around it in our data migration.
3. Document size is limited to 4 megabytes. It’s not a problem with our data model, but since MongoDB supports fantastic atomic in-place updates, you have to be careful not to grow your documents above this limit.
4. Adding new nodes is not as easy as it is with Cassandra. However, Cassandra has its own problems load-balancing them.

So far it’s been a very smooth ride. Development and database administration just got a whole lot easier.

» Now give the new and better Flowdock a try!

Also included in today’s update is the ability to retweet and reply to all Twitter messages in your flow. So whenever there’s important discussion in Twitter (it could be product feedback or brand publicity) you can instantly react to them just by pressing a button in Flowdock.

Last but not least, be sure to check out our fresh new website! Go read our tour pages showcasing our best features and check out who are the people behind Flowdock.

Display names

Firstly, all users can now specify a unique display name, which is the name that will be shown to other users in the flow. You can change the display name in your edit account page any time you want.

Highlights in the chat

If someone mentions your name in the chat, the line will be highlighted so you can spot important messages more easily. Also, highlighted messages will appear in the dashboard so you can see them even if you missed them while being out of Flowdock. Now when you ask somebody in your team an important question you can be quite sure you’ll get an answer even if you don’t have time to chat at the same time.

@User tags

The third major new feature is the addition of @user tags. They behave just like other tags, but they are specially linked to the users in the flow. For example, the team leader, Alice, wants to assign an email in the flow to another member, called Bob. Alice clicks the little tag icon beside the message and writes “@Bob” to the field that appears over the message. Instantly after that, Bob will see the message in his Dashboard and can start working on the task.

As with other tags, you can use the @user tags anyway you want. Use them for emulating an issue tracker or just pointing your team member’s attention to a single message. Just remember, tagging with @user tags means that the information is somehow important to the team member.

Remember to give feedback!

We are constantly improving Flowdock and this update is just a starting point for a better way of organizing your conversations. We need your feedback to make Flowdock better, so tell us what you think about these new features. To give feedback, you can use the feedback form in the Dashboard, add new ideas to our UserVoice page or email us at team@flowdock.com.

Bonus: Flowdock tips

Autocomplete names when writing chat messages and comments
Write a couple of letters from the beginning of your team member’s display name and press the tab key to fill the rest.

Better-looking code snippets in the chat
Paste a bunch of code to the chat input field, select it all with Cmd-A or Ctrl-A and press the tab key to indent it. Indented lines will be displayed with a monospace font and white-space will be preserved.

Click on any tag to search with Flowser
All tags, including @user tags, now link to Flowser searches so you can quickly navigate between your organized messages.

» 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.

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.

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!

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!