Aloha! Thank you for joining hawaii.slack.com, a Slack-powered community for Hawaii geeks, technologists, developers, and all-around smart people. As you may have gathered, I'm excited about the platform, and I hope you take advantage of the opportunity to explore it.

While I set up this team to see how the tool works, it's obviously a good group to actually network and talkstory with. Here's the roster so far, and as you can see, you're in good company. Developers, entrepreneurs, bloggers, photographers, educators... most in Honolulu, a few on Maui and Hawaii Island. Check in and say hello!

If you can think of someone who should be here, please let me or Burt Lum (@bytemarks) know, and we can invite them. We'll just need their email address (how quaint!).

What sorts of things came up this week in our Slack team?

One of the first things we've learned is that these team tools work best on mobile. Facebook wouldn't be one tenth as sticky without smartphones, and while Slack works well on the web, it's most compelling as an app. Try it, if you haven't yet!

Slack has been around for a year, and while it's new to me and many of you, it's been a huge hit in the startup world for a while. Medium, BuzzFeed, Heroku, SoundCloud, Lonely Planet, with more signing up every day. And I've heard from many local groups that it's already part of their workflow. There are many slack pros in our slack team now, so it's a great place to pick up tips and tricks.

No, I'm not getting paid to plug Slack. And I'm hardly an expert. But the first week in hawaii.slack.com has surfaced many good write-ups on the tool, from how it was built to why it's so addictive. If you want to learn more from far more qualified sources, check out the following links.

Thanks for humoring me and for signing up for this newfangled whatzit. I won't deluge you with emails like this (frankly, this is probably the only one I'll ever send out), but I did want to offer update for those of you who haven't checked in recently. I hope to see you in Slack soon, and either way, I hope you have a fantastic $userHoliday and an incredible new year!