I strongly dislike Slack: it’s an overhyped and proprietary web wrapper around IRC with history. It works just fine, but it bills itself as a replacement for email, which it isn’t, and so it’s become just another thing I have to check. Having said that, TechCrunch report and iMore paraphrase:

Slack plans to roll out voice and video chat this year, making the popular messaging company even more competitive with incumbents like Microsoft’s Skype and Google’s Hangouts. That’s according to their 2016 product roadmap, presented to customers at a conference today in San Fransisco.

I’m glad, because then I can stop saying that Slack is just an web wrapper around IRC with history, and people can stop telling me that “No! It’s also got zany error messages and GIFs.” I hope that Slack can do a better job than Skype, Hangouts, FaceTime, and all those awful corporate conferencing applications, because it’s a market which could really use improvement.

However everyone should stop using Slack for open source projects. Because it’s proprietary and costs money and is just a web wrapper around IRC. So stop it.