Slack is the go-to communication app for many teams — though as anyone who has used it will tell you, it’s hardly perfect. Doist, the company behind to-do app Todoist, has attempted to address some of those shortcomings with a new communications app called Twist.
In Slack, Conversations take place in traditional, linear chat feeds, though users have the option of creating threads in response to individual comments. But digging through chat histories to find what you’re looking for isn’t ideal — especially if you’re part of a team that moves quickly, with lots of back-and-forth between co-workers.
As a result, things can get out of hand pretty quickly. To make matters worse, some of Slack’s more useful features, like marking messages read or unread and creating snippets, are hidden away under a sea of shortcuts the average user probably isn’t aware of.
What all this means is although Slack may function well enough depending on your workflow, it’s not a perfect solution. While Twist surely isn’t the panacea to your productivity woes either, it operates in a fundamentally different way that could better serve your needs compared to what the competition is offering.
Whereas Slack recently gave users the ability to carry threaded conversations, everything in Twist is threaded right from the start. You still have your channels, but inside each channel are threaded conversations — much like a typical online forum. Composing a new thread looks and feels much like writing an email, except any user in your channel can initiate in-line conversations in response to your original post.
When you need to direct message a colleague, Twist gives you the power to do that as well. And, as in Slack, everything is searchable, with customizable filters to help you drill down and really find what you’re looking for.
Outside of conversations, there are a couple useful additions to Twist your team might appreciate. You can set a vacation status, as TechCrunch points out, which will provide a return date on your profile for your coworkers to see and mute notifications until then. Doist also promises integration with third-party services like automation tool Zapier and software development platform GitHub in the future.
Those interested can begin using Twist for free, though the free version doesn’t preserve all your conversations and files. A paid version, running $5 per user, per month, will maintain records of everything you share in the app. There are iOS and Android versions for mobile, Windows and MacOS support for PC users, and a web interface as well.
