
Twist – Mindful Team Communication - Jaruzel
https://twistapp.com/
======
mistaken
Hmm. It seems that these chat applications are more and more becoming like a
polished webmail system. Now they've introduced threads, it's searchable
forever, you can mail erm. I mean send messages to individuals or even groups.
This new technology is amazing. Seriously there is nothing wrong with using
e-mail (apart from the dated protocol) and for knowledge sharing your team is
better of with some kind of wiki with organized information.

~~~
amix
Why not just use email? This was asked by a ton of people and we have
addressed it here:
[https://help.twistapp.com/hc/articles/115003654589](https://help.twistapp.com/hc/articles/115003654589)

Email is great and we are fans of it, but not for internal team communication.

~~~
mdekkers
allright, let´s play this game, from your help page:

    
    
      > An email inbox is unorganized
    

Mine isn´t. Between folders and labels, my inbox is clean and organised.

    
    
      > Email chains easily become long and difficult to read, and can splinter off into multiple chains
    

The multiple threads/chains is a feature. I want to be able to splinter off a
discussion. Also, if you frequently have massive email chains, you might want
to just call a webex.

    
    
        > when someone goes on vacation or leaves your team, progress grinds to a halt
    

That is an organisational problem, not a communications-tool problem.

    
    
      > your email inbox is just one of many places where your team communicates.
    

And twist is going to be yet another place to look.

[rehash of email is bad]

    
    
      > On top of that, Twist gives your team the space to get deep work done by allowing you to snooze all notifications.
    

So, like slack, snoozed, but looks like email? When I need to put my head down
to get stuff done I switch stuff off, which appears to be the easier option.

~~~
dkersten
I'll add to your last point with:

Email never interrupts me. I have all audible and popup notifications turned
off and generally check if I have new email only when it suits me. I make this
super fast and simple by checking if my email icon on my phone has a little
red number. Takes two seconds. If I have email, I can read them, if I don't,
great.

Like you, I use filters and labels to keep my inbox clean. Automated emails
and mailing lists get filtered away right away (and I check them manually when
I feel like it). My inbox itself then takes a few seconds to clean leaving
only stuff I have to act on. I use the Spark mail client which is very similar
to google inbox in that I can quickly deal wia h messages or "snooze" those I
can't deal with right now.

This way, I have zero unread messages in my inbox most of the time. (And I get
OCD when I see other peopl ea phones or screenshots with 30k unread
messages... wtf is wrong with people!)

------
devrandomguy
Right off the bat, this has much better performance on my laptop than Slack;
Slack really spins the fans. Also, that extra layer of organization provided
by the thread column was needed badly. I personally was hoping for tags and
tag-groups in Slack, but this should also do nicely.

We have been using Slack as a UI for our backend services, for example, and it
is a great way to present reports and alerts, and offer basic controls to the
relevant person. For me, whether or not I actually adopt Twist will depend on
how easily I can interact with it from my own software.

I would suggest making the integrations page easier to find - I had to troll
through the Zendesk archive to find it, even though it is a core feature.
Also, a link to the API docs on the help page would be nice. (Edit: Didn't
realize until now that integrations are at the channel level, not the top
level.)

API docs: [https://doist.gitbooks.io/twist-
api/content/](https://doist.gitbooks.io/twist-api/content/)

~~~
Diederich
Curious: I've always used slack from a web browser rather than their native
app. What, if anything, do you personally miss from the web app in slack?

~~~
devrandomguy
Well, the native Slack app is just an Electron wrapper around their web app,
as far as I can tell. The performance feels roughly the same for both web and
desktop.

The main reason I kept the desktop app, is so that I don't need to "download"
the app every time my browser's cached copy is invalidated or expires. But
being able to start the app with a couple keystrokes from my OS's quick launch
menu is also nice.

~~~
Diederich
Interesting. So you're saying that it really 'spins the fans' when you run
slack as a pure web app as well? It seems quite lightweight to me, on latest
chrome in Ubuntu on a late 2016 macbook pro.

~~~
devrandomguy
Just tested again. Performance is good when idling, but while loading content
in a heavy channel, scrolling gets laggy and one CPU plateaus for a while.
Maybe the app is inserting DOM nodes individually, in a loop?

I guess it's too early for me to evaluate the performance of Twist, because I
am not on any large teams there. But I can see that Slack at least, has room
for improvement in rendering performance. Perhaps there is some general
optimization they are missing out on, like immutable state +
shouldComponentUpdate. That one saved a flailing app of mine in the past.

I'm in Firefox on Linux, i7-4500U, 8GB ram.

------
jpolitz
I think this has lots of potential. I have thought before that if I could make
two changes to Slack (which I already think is pretty great), they would be:

1\. Hitting "Enter" doesn't send the message. This encourages writing actual
paragraphs in response, rather than sending fragments of sentences

that can be interrupted across multiple lines

because you're not really sure if you've finished your sentence just yet

oh and you thought of one more thing so everyone else please take this line
into consideration as well

Of course, you might say "train your team to not do that." Sure. But I'd
rather use a tool that doesn't require breaking (perhaps reasonable) habits.
And if communication shouldn't be through short bursty chunks by default, why
make that the easiest thing to do?

2\. Make threads more of a default way to respond, and make thread comments
first-class citizens. Presented with the UX of Slack, it's really hard to move
yourself towards using threads because the easiest way to respond to things is
to type and hit enter. Also, threads live in their own "All threads" space,
not organized by channel. Thread comments aren't first-class citizens like
regular chat is because they can't have files attached, be posts or snippets,
etc, so sometimes it feels like I actually _lose_ functionality by starting a
thread.

Twist looks like it has what I love about Slack – good for newbies to join in
and see organized, curated history (I can't show new folks _my_ inbox labels
and organization, or spin up a new channel on a mailing list for each topic we
want to discuss), good for lurking on projects that aren't your own but are
related, and has emoji responses for celebration, quick feedback, and
commiseration.

~~~
twobyfour
Threads are pretty awful. It's really easy for messages and discussions to get
lost in them and for participants not to realize that more has been said.

~~~
ghthor
This is a UI/UX problem. You can make the same argument about an unorganized
spew tube that I now have to spend 50% of my cognitive ability to organize
into a threaded conversation manually in my head.

~~~
twobyfour
Huh, I've never found following concurrent conversations in Slack particularly
challenging, but then I spent a lot of time a handful of years back in fast-
moving chats that often had several unrelated discussions going on at once.
Maybe it's a learned skill.

That said, in 3 years at Slack-heavy companies, the level of interleaved
conversation I've encountered is almost nil. Maybe that's cultural (though the
consistency across multiple companies and teams suggests not). Maybe company
or team size is a factor. Maybe it's a matter of breaking it out into enough
channels that if there are multiple topics to discuss at once they're usually
happening in separate channels anyway.

Sure, Slack could probably improve the threads UI. (Though I happen to think
that threaded display and real-time discussion are in some ways conflicting
goals.) As it stands, however, they're a black hole. My team has actually
banned the use of threads (and no, it wasn't even my suggestion).

------
hex13
TL;DR: they just invented internet forum/message board but with nicer GUI.

And it's good.

I think internet went wrong way to ditch traditional internet
forums/discussion groups/ and internet communication started to be based on
real time chats (Slack, Messenger, Skype etc.), but I'm glad that we're
returning to the oldschool (I'm waiting for Facebook to introduce
"threads/topics" on its groups, because now Facebook groups are less
functional than plain old phpBB.

------
alfra
The problem they claim to address is real. However, the product not really
addresses it. It's too close to email and existing messengers.

[ Problem ]

\- Meetings have the potential to really keep a team together

\- Teams are distributed throughout geography, time zones or daily life
patterns

\- So how to bring GOOD meetings online, and perhaps even make them
asynchronous?

"Meetings" come in different flavors, for example

\- Weekly or monthly meetings to look back, learn, and discuss how to move on

\- Daily scrum / daily standup to get a shared view of the day

\- Ad hoc meetings to address a smaller but immediate issue

\- Water cooler meetings which allow for serendipity

...

So for meetings in person, the real challenge is to get everyone attending,
even if there is lot of urgent / important work to do. On the flip side: Keep
the signal / noise ratio of the meeting so everyone feels it's time well
spent.

[ Solution ]

So my vision for a better tool would include:

\- Separation of reading mode and writing mode. You should be able to write in
the sense of offloading thoughts without the need / option to read through
everyone else's notes at the same time

\- Asynchronous default. Stuff you write should be considered a draft until
intentionally "published" (exception: urgent stuff / water cooler stuff). That
would allow revising bigger thoughts before a "meeting".

\- Even asynchronous, virtual meetings should have schedules. So for "daily"
meetings, there should be a function that makes sure that everyone reads and
writes at least once a day. For "monthly" at least once a month, but without
that becoming a continuous "monthly meeting", which wouldn't allow to really
focus on it.

------
amix
We are also launching an integration with Zapier today:
[https://zapier.com/zapbook/twist/](https://zapier.com/zapbook/twist/)

And we also have a very powerful API:
[https://api.twistapp.com/](https://api.twistapp.com/)

And we are working on a lot more integrations.

~~~
boundlessdreamz
Do you have support for webhooks. Couldn't find any information about that

~~~
amix
Yes, we do. We implement the Resthooks spec. Please see this:
[https://api.twistapp.com/#integrations-rest-
hooks](https://api.twistapp.com/#integrations-rest-hooks)

~~~
boundlessdreamz
I meant incoming webhooks. These are outgoing webhooks.

------
jameslk
How is this different from Google Wave, besides being less clunky? How will it
overcome the adoption issues that Google Wave had?

~~~
nbrempel
This is the exact thought that I had.

What were the issues that Google Wave had? Why didn't it succeed?

~~~
MikeKusold
Marketing.

Google was unable to properly explain to people what wave did and why they
should use it, then killed it after 2 years citing adoption numbers.

~~~
goshx
Source code still available here: [http://incubator.apache.org/wave/source-
code.html](http://incubator.apache.org/wave/source-code.html)

------
bgentry
I'm really impressed by the attention to detail for a brand new product.

I know they spent a couple years getting to this point, but I can really
appreciate the quick, well-designed iOS app, and the native, non-Chromium /
non-Electron Mac app that only uses 35MB of RAM and has no noticeable idle CPU
draw. It's such a stark contrast with Slack and most of today's pseudo-native
apps.

Impressive launch!

------
azinman2
They keep saying it’s not email, but it looks a lot like email with
preconfigured filters. What am I missing? What’s so mindful about this?

~~~
gtirloni
It's way better organized than email. You can edit things together following
the same format (not the dozen different ways people will reply to emails),
you can edit, know things will look the same for everybody, know for sure
everybody has access to everything and can search, everybody sees the same
categories (not your own special way of organizing things while other
coworkers are lost in the their mess).

It's more a mix of wiki+email+chat.

------
dyeje
Eh, looks like a proprietary email system to me.

~~~
mistaken
And the old is new again to be sold once more.

------
gzapico
Just onboard, seems stylish, team oriented and not as stressful as Slack.

------
mmbleh
Google Wave came out a few years too early...

~~~
sametmax
Na the reason Google wave failed was that the idea was great but the
realization sucked.

Most of my friend were unable to understand the UI. The thing was sloooooow.
Trying to do anything meaningful would require a lot of tinkering.

~~~
dkersten
This was my problem with Wave. I found the UI really confusing (and the value
prop not high enough to get over the learning curve) and incredibly slow. I
tried it a few times and decided I didn't care for it.

------
tehabe
Looks nice, sadly I can't use it because I'm not sure all in my team are fine
with an English UI. Also still a lot of worries about the cloud. So it is
still sending back and forth Word documents and the hope you didn't miss any
because people didn't pay attention to whom they sent the emails.

------
beberlei
I will try this out with our company, because this is exactly how I wanted
Slack to have threading.

But Twists API to create either thread/comment in an integration will be more
complicated to do than Slack and their attachments are not very powerful
(yet?), migrating our existing Slack related code might proof difficult.

------
mdekkers
again? this was on HN just recently, but now it is "mindful" \- said it then,
and will say it again, it looks like email, and find that the hassle of yet
another communications tool not worth it in this case (basically email with a
default "reply-to-all" permanently jammed in place).

~~~
Jaruzel
It was? I specifically searched HN for 'twist' and for the URL before posting
- couldn't find it.

~~~
mdekkers
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14586390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14586390)

------
maitrik
I have actually thought about this idea before and really like what they are
trying to do. But I do not like the idea of installing one more app and
adopting one more platform.

Why not just use existing infrastructure of emails and integrate with that
nicely? The channels on Twist could be folders on gmails (with google
integration at first) and users could reply to threads from their favorite
email client. If they want to use a dedicated app they could easily install
the app.

I think this would help them with growth a lot more since it would use the
existing infrastructure of emails. Of course, it doesn't solve the
notifications problem that they are trying to solve but that's what the app is
for.

------
hergin
Maybe Google Wave arrived too early to the scene. These new generation chat
apps all reminds me the features of Wave.

------
erikpukinskis
What does this add to the space over Basecamp? They also provide a pretty good
message board-like system. Also with the benefit of many many many years of
refinement, and similar values to the Twist folks.

[https://basecamp.com/how-it-works](https://basecamp.com/how-it-works)

------
tarr11
Is there an API? One of the main values as a Dev is all the integrations we
use and build.

~~~
beberlei
yes had the same question: [https://www.gitbook.com/book/doist/twist-
api](https://www.gitbook.com/book/doist/twist-api)

it looks a bit more complicated than the Slack one, because of the
thread/comment difference, but the "Automatic URL Report" and "Loop in" email
based input looks very powerful as well.

------
bgentry
Here's their official launch blog post: [https://blog.doist.com/twist-mindful-
team-communication-28e8...](https://blog.doist.com/twist-mindful-team-
communication-28e83e661e69)

------
Jaruzel
Also:

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/21/twist-is-slack-without-
the...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/21/twist-is-slack-without-the-annoying-
distractions/)

------
desireco42
Slack makes hard for companies to charge money for these apps. I think it is
cool but probably not enough reason to make people to move.

One thing that would make me consider it, if I could open multiple windows at
the same time for example.

~~~
bgentry
You can open multiple windows at the same time:
[https://cl.ly/1C0q0C022o1X/Screen%20Shot%202017-06-21%20at%2...](https://cl.ly/1C0q0C022o1X/Screen%20Shot%202017-06-21%20at%2010.16.31%20AM.png)

~~~
desireco42
That is useful. Thanks.

------
dangero
I've actually been working on a similarly focused product but specifically for
enterprise: [http://www.progresschat.com](http://www.progresschat.com)

------
noodlesUK
This almost exactly replicates the workflow my team uses with discourse. I
don't see the advantage this has over plain old message boards... Perhaps
there's a feature I'm missing

~~~
klancaster
It has instant messaging as well, so I think that is the difference.

------
mrmondo
Hi, is there an offline / self hosted version available? Like many ops teams
we wouldn't want a lot of our conversations and attachments etc on public /
shared hosting.

------
alexkavon
<insert "so this is just like X communication software" comment here>

------
eggie5
just when I have everything migrated to slack...

------
kwoff
just a twist in my sobriety

------
hfauq
Why Doist is betting against group chat: [https://blog.doist.com/why-were-
betting-against-real-time-te...](https://blog.doist.com/why-were-betting-
against-real-time-team-messaging-521804a3da09)

~~~
eddyg
HN discussion on this blog post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14586390](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14586390)

