** This is the internet column for August 26th ** ** Filing early cos I'm off on holiday ** --- ALERTS BLURB --- INTERNET: Is email more trouble than its worth? The man who made Flickr thinks so, and his latest project is a website that aims to offer an alternative. Giles Turnbull takes a close look at Slack.com. With pictures. --- COPY --- (pics Slack and Butterfield are here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/234455/stewart-butterfield.jpg https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/234455/slack.png ) THE INTERNET COLUMN By Giles Turnbull [Standfirst] The man who accidentally created Flickr wants to make your work life less busy and more productive. Giles Turnbull looks at a web service called Slack. TIME TO SLACK OFF FROM WORK Stewart Butterfield hates email, so he's created a new service called Slack (slack.com) which he says is better. You might not recognise his name at first glance, but there's a good chance you'll have heard of his work. He's the man who accidentally created Flickr, one of the world's biggest and best-known photo sharing sites. (It was an accident because the photo-sharing bit was designed alongside an online game, but quickly became more popular than the game itself.) After selling Flickr to Yahoo! for a small fortune, he started work on some other ideas, and Slack is the latest. Slack takes familiar ideas from chatrooms and applies them to communication within teams. It's intended for use in businesses more than at home. You don't have an inbox anymore. There are no folders for sorting stuff into. Everything is done with chat between teams and individuals. Crucially, Slack remembers everything you type into it, and promises to make searching simple. You don't have to file away all your stuff, just search for what you need. You can upload files, share them with other team members, and annotate them. And of course, all of it works on pretty much any device you have to hand, including your phone. Butterfield doesn't claim to want to "kill" email - plenty of people have claimed that before, and it's still stubbornly popular - but he'd be glad to not have an inbox anymore. Slack is for people who feel the same way. Slack certainly looks slick. Only time will tell if Butterfield can use it to make your working day slickr. DRAWING WITH WORDS Do you like letters? Do you like art? You're going to love Texter, an online drawing toy that uses letterforms as paint. Enter your name or a favourite quotation into the box at the top-right, then just use your mouse or trackpad to draw on screen. Move fast and you get large letters, slowly and they get smaller. Sounds weird written down, but go to tholman.com/texter and you'll soon get the hang of it. Click the "Save" button and the site opens your drawing as a image in a new tab, which you can download by just dragging to your desktop. TRANSPORT FOR THE PEOPLE It's frustrating when public transport fails, and often there seems to be no-one to turn to and no way to ask for problems to be fixed. Fix My Transport is a website designed to deal with that. You can report a problem with transport, and the site automatically passes your comments on to the local council or transport operator who is responsible for dealing with it. Your complaint becomes a web page, which you can get other travellers to add their support to. The hope is that responsible organisations will notice the problem, and ideally fix it (although they're not obliged to). Find out more at www.fixmytransport.com. TOKYO IN A PICTURE Want to see Tokyo? No need to go there - just spend a few hours exploring Jeffery Martin's enormous 600,000 pixel panoramic photograph. If it was printed out, it would be 100m wide and 50m high. It won't display on your computer screen in any normal kind of way, so you have to start with a tiny thumbnail view and zoom your way in, then around. The finished image is made of hundreds of smaller ones, taken with a computer-controlled camera and stitched together using one of the most powerful computers you can get. Explore it at tinyurl.com/giga-tokyo BROWSING AROUND ... ONLINE BACKUPS :: Get a Dropbox www.dropbox.com :: Skydrive, from Microsoft skydrive.live.com :: Put your bits in Bitcasa www.bitcasa.com :: Plan for crashes: Crashplan www.crashplan.com :: Unlimited backups at Backblaze www.backblaze.com :: Put your stuff in the Justcloud www.justcloud.com THING OF THE WEEK :: Go trekking with Google goo.gl/onHTW6 Giles Turnbull has a website at gilest.org End