One of the key things in Flowdock from the very beginning has been to bridge the gap between conversation and knowledge, between a nonchalant talk one Tuesday morning and a fully organized wiki page. This has proved to be a difficult task. The concept that we introduced in Flowdock to solve the problem was tagging. We put tagging in a context where no on else has thought to try it – an ongoing conversation. It’s easy to spot important bits from flowing talk, but the next step, taking that important information and cultivating it into meaningful knowledge, can be laborous. With Flowdock, this step takes you about one second. Add a tag, and you’ve essentially added that piece of information to a labeled list.

For the longest time the only way of finding this content in Flowdock has been to look for them by their tags. Real full-text search has it’s technical problems but the real reason has always been that we wanted people to get acquainted with the idea of tagging parts of a conversation. At the same time, the most wanted feature amongst our user base has been for a long time – that’s right – full-text search. Now it has been implemented.

Introducing Full-Text Search

The search can be used in Flowser, just like searching with tags. The implementation is subtle. The initial UI hasn’t changed a bit. Instead, when you’re making a tag search, in the dropdown list of tags, the last option is an actual full-text search. We think the user experience is pretty smooth.

The results show up really quickly.

Tell us what you think, how it’s working for you. We’ve already realized that this makes the need even more obvious to be able to jump into chat history from the search results. That feature is already underway.