You might not know what Slack is, but for many large companies – including MakeUseOf – it's replacing email for internal communications. If you want to see where the web is going, you need to try it out.

People really love Slack, but it's hard to fully explain why. At first it seems like a glorified chat room, but use it for a while and you'll see there's much more. It makes group communication easier  (particularly brainstorming) by letting conversations flow naturally. It works well as a project management tool. It makes it easy for people to leave conversations they're not interested in.

Best of all, though, Slack can interface with just about any app you can imagine in surprisingly useful ways. We've outlined plenty of Slack tips, but today Cool Websites and Apps is going to point out a few integrations every Slack fan will love. Let's get started.

Clicky (Chrome): Post Links to Any Channel in One Link

Sharing links quickly is one of the best part of Slack – the program shows your co-workers a preview, and in some cases will even embed everything. Clicky makes sharing this even faster. This Chrome extension lets you share the current open page as a link in just two clicks.

clicky-slack-tool

It's simple, sure, but it saves you having to copy the URL and paste it. If you use Slack to share and discuss links, you need to know about this one.

Notify: Be Notified When Your Site or Startup is Mentioned Online

Of course, why paste links manually if you can make a bot do it for you? Notify lets you know when specified keywords are mentioned on Tumblr, Hacker News, Reddit and more.

notify

Set the keyword to be your company's name and you've got a powerful way to monitor who is talking about you. We implemented this for MakeUseOf and quickly found all sorts of people linking to our articles on Tumblr – some even in other languages. It's useful for us, and could be for you.

Slack List: Find Great Communities

Slack isn't just a great way to communicate with co-workers – it's also a great tool for socializing. If you'd like to meet great people who share your interests, Slack List is a great way to find communities worth joining.

slack-list-communities

Take a look and see if you find anything interesting – you just might find a group worth joining, and have a few great conversations.

SupportKit for Slack

Talking with your team is great, but what if you could use Slack to talk to the people who visit your site or use your app? SupportKit, a tool for adding chat rooms to apps, can now connect directly to Slack.

https://www.anrdoezrs.net/links/7251228/type/dlg/sid/UUmuoUeUpU52893/https://vimeo.com/114821164

With this set up your entire team can react to questions your would-be customers might have. If you want to make a good impression with users, this is well worth checking out.

Slacker (Web): Post To Slack as Bender, Vader and More

And now for something completely pointless: a way to join conversations on Slack as your favorite fictional characters. Slacker is a website that can post to any Slack chatroom – posts will appear to come from a variety of characters.

slacker-post-characters

This isn't worth much more than the occasional joke, but it can be a pretty joke if you use it properly. The best part: while your co-workers will obviously figure out that a real life Doge isn't talking to them, they won't necessarily know it's you. Please enjoy responsibly.

What Are Your Favorite Slack Add-Ons?

As Slack's popularity continues to grow you're going to see even more integrations like this. For my part, I found a few I couldn't fit in this column:

People keep building great things around this platfroms; there's even an unofficial Slack app for Linux. I want to know what you've found. What's the best Slack tool you've found, and how do you use it? Let's chat in the comments below.