<p>Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder of Flickr who eventually left its acquirer Yahoo and started TinySpeck (and an ill-fated multiplayer game called Glitch), last year decided to take a different turn, porting his expertise in consumer services to tackle the enterprise market. The result was Slack, a collaboration platform that lets users port in conversations and links to other work from dozens of other apps (including Dropbox, Google Docs, GitHub and Asana) so that they can track progress on different projects in one common platform; more generally converse about work in a less fragmented way, and crucially reduce email overload.</p><p>Or, in Butterfield's words, help the working world emerge from "email bankruptcy."</p><p>Today, after a successful, limited beta run that kicked off in August 2013, Slack is launching to the rest of the world a step, Butterfield tells me, that it's making as it prepares to introduce pricing tiers around additional services.</p><p>Since that August launch, Butterfield says that "things have been going crazy", with the teams that have been trialling it seeing usage from "every single team member every day." Those teams he asked me to keep the names out of the article range in numbers of between 250 people down to around 10 (which is closer to the typical number, he says), and interestingly they are starting to see some pick-up from non-tech corners of the world, including a U.S. church, a building materials company, and a group in the UK government.</p><p><a href="http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/12/slack-exits-beta/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/02/12/this-flickr-co-founder-wants-to-rid-the-world-of-e-mail/">This Flickr co-founder wants to rid the world of e-mail</a> (Fortune)</p><p><a href="http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/12/flickr-cofounder-launches-email-killer-slack-to-the-world/">Flickr cofounder launches 'email killer' Slack to the world</a> (VentureBeat)</p><p><a href="http://www.engadget.com/2014/02/12/slack-collaboration-software/">Flickr co-founder's Slack collaboration tool leaves beta, goes freemium for all</a> (Engadget)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dPg6ra7zdLCoFEMnLaObCltZQVeMM&authuser=0&ned=us">17 additional articles.</a></p>
