Hamster Pad Helps You Find Cool Slack Communities

Are you a Slovenian web dev? A French iOS programmer? A sad person in need of friends? Get thee to the Hamster Pad. This new site Matt Schlicht and his buddy Adam McKenna aggregates hundreds of Slack communities, from programming-centric rooms to rooms for writers.

“Nothing like Hamster Pad exists right now. We have literally taken the Slack API and started to create an entire social network built on top of their platform,” said Schlicht. “Anyone can add a chat, anyone can join a chat, and if you become friends with someone you can see what chats they are in.”

“I see the Slack ecosystem as something very similar to the Facebook platform in 2007 when they announced their API. Slack, with 2 million daily active users, is not quite as large as Facebook was in 2007, but the opportunities are similar.”

The service is pretty darn easy. You sign up and click on a few rooms. You are then invited to each room individually and you can then talk to people. Hamster Pad doesn’t really do much except bring all the cool rooms into one place and offer a few pieces of data about them including total number of people online now and friends who might be taking part in heated discussions of API calls.

Schlicht and his team also built ZapChain, a bitcoin-powered forum. This new service is a different form of community based around quick and easy aggregation and the idea that humans want to talk to other humans. A/S/L anyone?