Welcome to the world of enterprise messaging, we now have another Slack competitor and it is called Twist. While Slack has gained immense popularity and helps us keep up with our coworkers, there are features of the app that do not exactly gel with this product we’ve all come to admire over the years. Thus, Doist, the team behind widely known to-do list app Todoist, is now entering the game with its own take on the concept — but in a rather minimalistic form.
An enterprise messaging app should be about team coordination and work organization, which sometimes feels just like a bloated reality for Slack. Thought it does both these things with utmost sincerity but the platform sometimes gets cluttered with a massive load of GIFs, notifications, as well as threaded conversations. This can be frustrating when you’re trying to concentrate on building that analytical report and Billy wants to share cute cat GIFs.
Thus, Twist has borrowed the tried and tested concepts from Slack and built upon that base from scratch. This means, Doist’s team has imbibed their minimalist impression and knack for productivity into this new messaging app. It has been working on Twist for more than a couple years, as the said project started back in 2014. Talking about the highlight of the Twist messaging app, the blog post reads:
Twist has been mindfully designed around asynchronous communication, which gives teams the space and time to truly disconnect to do deep work. The Doist team has conceptualized Twist so that there is no pressure for users to respond in real-time.
While Slack focuses on real-time collaborative efforts (conversations), Twist has decided to provide users with all the free time they need to concentrate simply with the process of shuttering annoying notifications from each channel. Instead it has decided to build upon the same by handing down all controls to you — snoozeable notifications and no presence indicator. It is surely a lot like Slack but still very different.
Twist takes on a different approach with the concept of threaded conversation within channels (yeah, every enterprise chat app has it). You no longer have to message about a certain topic and then work your way through the conversation under that one message. The Doist team thought this was a messy and unflattering approach, thus, it provided Twist users the ability to create topics within channels to discuss certain things from start to finish. It would not disturb the other teams working in unison within the company.
Talking about the launch, Amir Salihefendic, founder and CEO of Doist in a statement said:
Today, unhurried, asynchronous communication isn’t the norm. Nevertheless, we’re betting that, in the future, the most successful companies will be those that adopt this way to work.
When you don’t require your employees to be constantly connected, you’re able to make a shift towards putting real value on deep work and work-life balance. We’re excited to be a part of this movement.
While Twist may be minimalistic but is surely packs within all the necessary features one requires within an enterprise messaging app. This means you can simply chat and discuss projects or make use of third-party integrations like Todoist, Zapier and Github. The application also enables you to share documents, send emails to threads, and make customizations as per your convenience to be more productive.
Twist launched in beta back in January and is now being made available to the public today across all major platforms, including web, iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows. And since this a rather competitive ecosystem to step foot into, especially when you’re also competing with the likes of Microsoft, Doist has adopted an affordable freemium model. You’ll have to $5 per month per user for unlimited access to Twist’s services.
