For people who think Slack is just a little bit too formal, there’s Huckle. The platform makes kicking off a group chat with your friends, fans and followers as easy as composing a tweet, hitting send and tapping away until your fingers go numb. Until recently, the platform was only available on iOS, but that’s changing today with a brand new browser-based interface.
“Twitter is about real conversation in real-time, and Huckle gives every Twitter user the power of instant group chat with their followers,” Huckle’s CEO, Jordan Stone said. “Our new web app enables our users and their followers to chat from the comfort of a full-size keyboard.”
According to Huckle, this is how happy your fans will be if you talk to them using their platform. Would you really deprive them of that unfettered joy? You wouldn’t, would you.
Stone should know the challenges here, too; he used to be the head of digital marketing for Taylor Swift, and has probably seen one or two Twitter conversations take an unexpected turn.
“When a celebrity launches a chat on Huckle, they immediately get fans rushing to chat with them, and it’s all right there in an easy-to-navigate format,” said Stone. “The current way of doing group chats on Twitter, using retweets and hashtags, is too confusing,” he says, and adds, “It’s just like a big group text.”
The platform is rapidly gaining new users — I guess it can’t harm that Jewel recently embraced Huckle for talking to her fans, and that Drew Scott (of Property Brothers fame) has thrown himself at his fan’s mercy using the platform, too.