I would like to see some kind of standard. Having multiple closed platforms is great for the profits of the companies that run said services, but the users are the ones that have to pay the price.<p>We&#x27;ve seen this already once with messaging systems. Remember AOL, MSN Messenger, ICQ, etc? Now, it&#x27;s no better, just that the actor&#x27;s names are different. Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts, Wechat, Line.<p>Do we really want this to happen all over again? I certainly can see the appeal of a system like Slack. After all, we used it ourselves for a while until we decided that we didn&#x27;t want the vendor lock-in, and instead started developing out own, open source system that implements lots of what Slack is, but that can be self-hosted by anyone.<p>I would love to see the makers of these kinds of applications to create some kind of standard around these systems.