When Ross Mayfield launched Pingpad in September, the idea was to give people an app that combined collaboration and conversation in one. Focused on social productivity, the app blended real-time messaging with a Wiki-like product. However, in June, the company announced that it was discontinuing its app and would be pivoting toward a new direction, one focused on team collaboration in the enterprise.
Today, Pingpad has relaunched, and this time it has positioned itself within Slack. With the new product, the company wants to enable teams to not only share knowledge with each other but to also make better decisions and take appropriate actions.
The spirit behind the service has remained, but the overall user experience and interface have changed. Mayfield explained that Pingpad will create a real-time wiki or note for every Slack channel, and every time that note is updated, the respective channel will be notified.
Since its private beta program started, the company has discovered four cases in which Pingpad can be useful in this enterprise team setting. The first is as a primary area for teams to communicate — Pingpad will create a channel called #Teamsite, along with a corresponding wiki. This is the dashboard for all of your team’s information — such as contacts, passwords, tools, instructions, and more.
Another, fairly straightforward, use case centers around meeting notes.
Pingpad is also useful as a repository for documentation stored on Slack, so if you happen to have a #design or #QA channel, teams can use Pingpad to store best practices, instructions, brand guidelines, or tutorials that are necessary for teams to function.
Lastly, Mayfield sees this Slack bot as a glossary for team operations. He shared that it can be a place where teammates can find common vocabulary and answers to common questions. Pingpad also supports a Slack command that lets you @reply, along with “X is Y” to establish a definition or answer.
This relaunched service supports “Sign in with Slack” as well as slash commands.
In a Medium post, Mayfield explained why Pingpad opted to focus on Slack, citing the platform’s great APIs and the fact that it is a fast-growing enterprise company with more than 3 million daily active users. He also noted that Slack’s business model is in alignment with what Mayfield’s team wants to do. He added that Slack doesn’t “want to do a Twitter,” meaning that Slack isn’t interested in rubbing developers the wrong way.
Pingpad’s Slack bot is free to use until you’ve hit 100 notes per team. From there, it’s assumed that you’re engaged and getting a lot of value out of the service. The company offers a premium subscription of $4 per user per month that provides an unlimited number of notes and enterprise-grade support.
There are some limitations as to how you can use Pingpad. You’ll be able to create new notes within Slack, but if you’re looking to edit them, it’ll have to be done on the desktop or mobile web. The company is still working on developing rich mobile apps.
