Slack Adds Emoji Reactions (Goodbye, Productivity)

The new emojis have always been one of the most demanded features from Slack’s 1.1 million users.

“We argued about what symbol we would use – a heart, a star, a thumbs-up, a check-mark” the company said in the post.

Slack, the $US2.8 billion business communication app, has rolled out a new feature that allows users to “like” or “fave” a message with emojis – in 722 different ways. “But then we realized that all these were already in the default emoji set… along with the dancers, the sparkles, the monkeys, the smiling, crying, grimacing faces, and the poop”.

Here’s a possible use case: you ask your team whether they want to go to MobileBeat next week (tickets still available) and instead of posting “I’m in” or “can’t wait”, they can respond with emojis such as thumbs up, hands raised, etc. Slack always had a “star” icon next to every message, but that was used for archiving messages.

Practically though, it’s an extremely useful tool for quickly letting someone know that you understand the message. Or fireworks. Or whatever. You can host polls in your Slack channel and have members vote with specific emojis, applaud someone for a job well done, or even add your own images to let everyone in your team start using them as emojis.

To make the entire emoji selection process a wee bit easier-since who has time to memorize where everything is, anyway-Slack also updated its emoji-picking utility.

If you’re a millennial worker bee, reading this from an open office plan that includes 350 of your closest pals, odds are good that you’re probably sitting in a Slack chat.

Reactions can be added to basic messages, as well as files, with a special new Recent Mentions tab so that you can see all your reactions in a single place.