The company that makes Todoist just released a team messaging app called Twist. I love Todoist so when a friend messaged me about this I was definitely interested. Having used Twist for a couple days, I’m not so sure if it is going to work for us.
He and I have used Todoist over the past year to keep up with a shared reading plan, and we used the comment features in Todoist to discuss the readings. Todoist was fantastic for keeping up with our shared reading plan, and the way we used the app for discussion was OK. We would create a task for each major section of the book, and then simply comment on that task, turning it from an actual task to a hub for discussion. Not ideal, but functional.
I know a reading team of two is not exactly the sort of team Twist is intended to help. The app may be overkill for our purposes, but I wanted to try it out because it could potentially make our discussions a lot easier to keep up with. If you google twist doist you will find that the headlines describe it as something like “a less distracting take on Slack” (Engadget, for example). I’ve never used Slack, but everyone I know who uses a team communication app does. I’m confident that since Doist is behind this app it will get better and likely be a (the first?) genuine rival to Slack.
Here’s my take after a couple days. At this point, Twist is frustrating, but we’re bearing with it. Part of my frustration comes, no doubt, from the fact that I like to keep my app game as simple as possible, and I’m just experiencing new app growing pains. There are a few other things, however. First, every time I send a message I get a pop up asking me if I’m sure I want to notify everyone in the channel. This happens anytime I comment on anything, and I do not see a way to make it stop (update: a friend showed me that if you only have individuals of a team selected and note some variation of “everyone” the pop up goes away). Second, our reading team of two is now a reading team of three because Twist automatically adds “Ada Bot,” a messaging bot that I can’t figure out how to kill. I asked it, “How can I delete you.” It said, “I need a lot more training. Please contact support …” Just seeing that silly bot everywhere is so annoying. Finally, I’ve struggled a little navigating the various portions of the app — teams, groups, channels, threads, and comments. For me, it’s a bit cumbersome. I’d be interested to hear from Slack users what they think about the Twist UI.
I do like the inbox feature, which allows me to see a list of every post no matter what channel it is posted in. And again, I love that Doist is behind it. Todoist is spectacular, and I expect Twist will be too within a few months.
Brian W. Davidson 