Web · 2016-02-07

‘Hamster Pad’ adds a social networking layer on top of the Slack chat platform

hamster_padSlack has become a popular chat & messaging platform, but it can be difficult to sift through it if you’re looking to join like-minded communities. If you want to easily find & navigate discussions about your favorite tech or hobby topic on Slack, then you should probably check out ‘Hamster Pad’.

Even though the halcyon days of IRC, AOL, & MS Messenger are over, it looks like chat rooms are making a real comeback with platforms like Slack, HipChat & discord rapidly gaining adherents. People are a little tired of status updates & posts on social networks & want to talk to other people in real-time. Us humans like a little conversation? What a concept!

Although Slack began as a community aggregator for programmers & other tech dweebs, it has lately been taken up by such disparate groups as writers, marketers & a wide variety of hobbyists. As Slack opened up its API, this has prompted Silicon Valley pros Matt Schlicht & Adam McKenna from the tech startup ZapChain to found Hamster Pad. Their aim was to make it easy for users to find & join Slack communities while keeping track of them & their Slack friends, & from the looks of it they have succeeded.

Currently Slack has over 2 million daily active users & many hundreds of communities & it is rapidly growing. When you join Hamster Pad you can easily add or join a chat, friend another user & see what chats they’ve joined. Then you talk to folks in each community’s chat, which can center on a very specific topic, or be as general as you like. It’s up to you.

Hamster Pad has managed to enable the use of Slack for a new class of casual users, potentially opening up the user base a great deal. It simplifies finding & creating chat rooms by organizing them in a novel manner, showing interesting information about each one like the number of users online at the moment, & exactly where your friends are engaging in chats.

 
– This post is merely a startup profile based on publicly available information & not a review. – 
 
Image Credit: Hamster Pad
 
 
 
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