inessential: Group Communication App Models

I have no skin in this game but for me, using Slack with (currently 8) different groups, what I really crave is some kind of universal inbox.

On the desktop there is way too much mouse-work involved in keeping up with dirty feeds. What I’d envision is basically an aggregator of all the rooms I’m currently watching. Each blurb posted to this feed would include the base Slack server name along with the room it was posted in and the author. If space became a major concern it would eliminate attachments immediately (no images in the universal inbox) and it could truncate long text messages to the first carriage return.

From here, clicking on any message in the universal feed would show me an input box just like the one you get when you open a new direct message session with the expection that when you hit enter; it would be posted to the room.

Slack would also provide a setting that allows me to follow that post into the intended room after it’s sent so I can focus my attention on that before returning to the global feed with a key-command.

This would extend to mobile a bit differently. There I’m only interested in the data itself, responses could forward me to the room directly so that I can respond in-line there.