Thanks for posting Chris and I appreciate the thoughtful note.
Earl is another simple internal tool that our team uses as part of our development process and we wanted to share it with the community. Earl does a couple of very simple things:
1) Earl will expand (unfurl) links shared in Slack. Slack already unfurls public links, but that doesn't help when you're sharing a link to a private repo your team uses or any other resource that requires a login. Once you connect the services you use (e.g. GitHub, Asana, Google Drive, etc.), Earl will be able to unfurl links in channels where he is invited.
2) Earl automatically adds trackbacks to Slack conversations when you share a link. For example, if you share a pull request into Slack, Earl will add a comment to that pull request that contains a link to the Slack conversation where the pull request was shared. This creates a nice reference and helps with stale links. Next time you look at that pull request, you can find the conversation where it was discussed and recall what was decided around that pull request.
We've only added a couple of connected services to Earl right now, but we'll add more as people request them. Tell us which services you'd like to see integrated in the comments!
This looks incredibly cool and useful — providing an early example of a "blended experience" — such that your authenticated context is carried from the remote party and unified within Slack so that you can see the information that you have access to see, even if the file, information, or remote context is private.
Why is this significant? Well, one of the things we've lost in migrating from the desktop to the cloud is a unified user-authenticated context for apps to play in. On the desktop, you didn't need to sign in to every app that you use (that's changing though), or explicitly authorize each app to have access to other files (although recent iterations of operating systems have locked down access to contacts and other sensitive information). Instead of jumping through an authorization step, you can simply drag and drop — and through the magic of file formats and disk I/O (rather than web APIs) — you can share and move files seamlessly.
In the cloud, every service has to be pre-registered with every other service and then, in addition, get user authorization to move files or take action on behalf of the user.
Earl, it seems, is an attempt to collapse some of the contexts that keep you from accessing richer descriptions and information that you already have access to, and brings it into a shared working context.
Just installed, very slick installation process! Insanely simple. Would be cool if when the bot joins your channel, it posts a message explaining how it works for other people to try. (Same when you configure a new backend.) Nice work!
Earl
Forecast