What makes topics “powerful”?
When we talk about the importance, and the power of topics, we’re not down-playing the importance and usefulness of chat. In fact, most of our in-house 1:1 communication in Ryver is done with chat. However, making good use of topics in a team setting has some significant advantages over a pure chat product:
Threaded Discussion
In a team setting, it is easy to get multiple conversation threads going at once in chat, requiring each person to expend additional time and brain power sorting out the discussions in their head. That’s not a problem with topics and replies, which provide natural threading of conversations.
Find the signal
Imagine joining a project team mid-project and needing to catch up. If that team is using a group chat product, how quickly could you scan through days or weeks of chat conversations and summarize the important bits in your head? In Ryver, we find ourselves putting the important information in topics, and promoting important chat transcripts to topics. Now you can quickly browse the topics for a team and catch up on all of the important details!
File organization
By attaching files, cloud storage links, or web site URLs to your topics and replies, you can now put those files and links in proper context for improved organization. The Ryver Files tab helps you quickly browse files within the context of an individual or team, and then drill down to the specific post discussion in which the file was originally shared.
Promotion
With Ryver, you can extract important information out of a chat stream and save it as a topic, with the chat transcript attached. We also have a Chrome browser plugin that allows you to promote a Gmail message to a topic! Get out of email reply-all hell and start a discussion in Ryver!
Subscription/Notification
Doing team communication in Topics results in notifications in the Notifications tab for anybody who is subscribed to the team (when you join a team as a teammate, you are subscribed by default, but can unsubscribe from the Profile tab). This gives your teammates a quick way to catch up on important conversations, where chat tends to be a little more casual in nature.