Every so often a product comes along and focuses a huge amount of attention on itself.

Twitter was like that. Before that Netscape and its offshoots. Before that Sidekick and before that spreadsheets. These are just in my own area, I'm sure games have their own products that completely gain the focus. And graphic software like Photoshop. Cars and living room furniture too.

They influence everything that follows, I think in a good way.

Slack is doing that now.

There are going to be a huge number of Slack-like things. We will get tired of hearing people say that. But there are some important ideas in there.

Most important imho are the integrations.They define a set of web services that could plug into lots of things. And lots of things could be created to have those services plug into them. That's the part that interests me the most.

Slack has the potential to be one of the biggest coral reefs of all time. Honestly I don't see how it could not become a coral reef. But I always am one to wear the rose-colored glasses. Things never turn out as well as I think they should.

Slack's influence and the new open interface we got a look at from Facebook, are making the end of 2015 shape up as one of the most interesting times.