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Todoist Maker Launches Twist, a 'Calmer' Team Communication Service

Todoist Maker Launches Twist, a 'Calmer' Team Communication Service

By Pranay Parab | Updated: 22 June 2017 16:24 IST

Highlights

Twist is a messaging app for office use
It is betting against real-time messaging
The app competes against Slack and Microsoft Teams

Doist, the company behind well-known productivity app Todoist, has launched a new service for team communication. This service is called Twist and it competes against established giants in this space such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, Hipchat, Flock, and Workplace by Facebook.

Team communication services are essentially group messaging apps for companies. While you’d use WhatsApp groups for personal communication, those aren’t well-suited for professional environments. If you don’t want random WhatsApp pings distracting you while you are working, you should consider using team communication services such as Slack.

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However, Twist has taken a totally opposite approach when compared with Slack and Microsoft Teams. Slack is all about real-time messaging — you expect instant responses from colleagues. The developers of Twist say this didn’t work for them at all. Doist is a company with around 40 employees, all of whom work remotely. It’s a team spread across continents and the gap in time zones meant that each group of people would wake up to see several hundred unread messages. This, Doist says, was becoming a hindrance to communication.

That’s where Twist comes in. Developed over three years, the app focuses heavily on threads to avoid confusion and to ensure that each conversation stays on topic. In a way, it’s similar to Facebook status messages and comments on those. Twist says this allows for distraction-free communication and calls it a much calmer approach to messaging.

Twist’s free tier is quite generous — it allows you to search for up to one month of message archives, 5GB of file storage, and up to five integrations. The paid tier doesn’t have these limits and costs $6 (roughly Rs. 400) per user per month, which is discounted to $5 (roughly Rs. 330) per user per month if you pay annually.

While Twist’s approach might work for some teams, many teams use Slack for its focus on real-time messaging. For instance, a news website cannot always afford to have a calmer messaging experience when breaking news is the top priority. However, there are several companies we know of that could use a more organised topic-based team messaging app and perhaps Twist is the solution they’ve been looking for.

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