Slack launches app download store

Collaboration software maker Slack has started offering apps through the Slack App Directory. Initially, there will be just over 160 different extension tools for teams in a variety of collaborations.

Slack sorts the apps under different categories by popularity. There are also staff picks. The apps can also be found via Slack itself by combining the /apps command with a keyword. Slack wants the app ecosystem to be expanded and has created a fund for that that contains eighty million dollars. This fund is there by the grace of the various investors behind Slack. These organizations want to ensure that smaller companies or individual developers also start making apps for Slack.

To develop apps and especially bots even faster and easier, a bot developer tool has also been released by Howdy. The toolkit should make it easier for developers to develop a bot without having to reinvent the wheel first.

A well-known Slack bot is the New York Times’ Blossom, which helps NYT editors make choices about which articles to post on social media. Developed by the newspaper’s data research team, Blossom predicts which articles or blog posts will do well on social media and also lets editors know how to promote the stories. A post done using Blossom would get up to 380 percent more clicks than a non-Blossom post. The newspaper bot is not in the public app directory.