Automatically display an emoji to represent your location in Slack. Let co-workers know where you are working. Re:loc shares your location (not your coordinates) with your team on your Slack channels in the form of emoji and a location name.
Hey Product Hunters!
Re:loc was designed to allow co-workers, friends, associates, or even strangers to have transparency into your general location while maintaining privacy. Display emojis to represent your location in Slack.
The journey began back in 2017 while we moved between a variety of facilities for work and hobbies. Our locations would change not just daily but within the day. A week might be mixed up between places such as the
- coffee shop ☕️
- office 🏢
- co-working facility 🏛
- home 🏠
- makerspace 🏰
We would get messages from co-workers, associates, and friends throughout the day asking if where we were at. People were curious because they wanted to grab lunch, meet in person, or to socialize.
Updating our Slack status across multiple channels daily or even multiple times per day became a burden. While we were comfortable sharing my location with a few close people, we weren’t ready to open our locations to everyone in our social network. The issue of sharing location while maintaining privacy was a tricky one.
The solution at the time was a Slack app that was created by one of our founders (@machadolab) called Locmoji. It used IFTTT (If this then that), which allowed you to define a geofence. Whenever you entered or exited the defined boundaries, it would automatically update your Slack status across multiple Slack accounts. The app was primarily used by others in our network who saw the value of sharing their location automatically while maintaining a level of privacy.
Fast forward to 2020; there was a massive shift in where everyone was working. While many were forced to work from home for a period of time, others switched between their home and office. The locations of our co-workers became harder to keep track of and made us feel more disconnected.
For this reason, we decided to launch re:loc to help share your location with co-workers, friends, or associates more easily without giving up your coordinates. We also wanted to remove the complexity of using the IFTTT app, which is very hard for the average person to configure, so we rolled out our own easy to use mobile app.
✅ Easy to setup – Quickly define a location, pick emojis to represent the location, and set time restrictions for updating your Slack status.
✅ Automated – Your status updates anytime you enter or exit a defined area.
✅ Privacy Centered – Our mobile app never transmits your location coordinates off of your phone. Our app is not actively listening to your current location – we set up “geofences” using the phones API to tell our app when you enter/exit the locations that you define.
We hope you will enjoy! 😊Let us know if you have any comments, questions, or feedback on Re:loc!
Re:loc