austinsharp

Seems like the key shared characteristic of these examples are small communities where people care about each other. As you say, it works at smaller scales. But free rider problems are a lot tougher in a community of millions or more.

I was surprised to see no mention of automation tools like IFTTT and Tasker. These sorts of overarching automation oriented tools let people solve a lot of problems by stitching together things that aren't designed to work together.

I would actually put Excel in this original category. Part of Excel's utility is that it is really good at enabling building of dashboards, applications, whatever. While Excel's builders didn't have D&D character sheets in mind, they definitely expect users to do unanticipated things with the software, just as much as IFTTT or Tasker would.

In some ways this is a "platform" type of perspective. "Here's a bunch of building blocks, go do whatever you think you need" is really powerful once the network effect of building blocks gets big enough. Any tool with a built-in DSL or workflow builder type of UI is probably in this category.

My tip on life insurance: don't buy it from your existing auto/home insurance company. In my recent experience it's far cheaper from a dedicated life insurance company. I also got a discount going through Costco.

IntelliJ lets you expand links from patterns, so if in our codebase there's a BUGREPORT-12345 link, it's blue and clickable and goes to jira.

They rewrote it from a native app to a web app, and it got a lot slower. Limits on the size / number of videos active. Status was not as flexible as we wanted (i.e. reminders when you forget to update, time zone conversion, etc).

We used to use Sococo and got frustrated and abandoned it a couple years back, actually.

If you hit the Slack button it opens a link to that Slack chat. If you are in a room with a group it'll open a group DM to the other people present. (I personally rarely use the Slack button because any given DM or channel in Slack is only ever alt+tab and ctrl+k away, but that's just me.)

I'll second The Witness as a great game. Very different, and beautifully designed.

Telegram has great features. It's fast, available on every platform, and the clients are open source. I've had good uptake on it among friends and family, especially with the option of easy web and desktop clients.

As others have said it's not as theoretically secure as WhatsApp or (especially) Signal. But I think it benefits from being the main product of a company that is totally focused on messaging, not on advertising (see all of Facebook and Google's messengers). The experience is great and even as they add features, they manage to keep things clean and stay out of your way, so you can ignore all the new features and just use it for simple stuff that it does really well.

That said, I haven't used WhatsApp much because I don't know many people who do. It comes down to where the people you want to talk to are, and if you can influence them to go elsewhere.

You might want to look into Google Voice. Free number for texting, calls over data. I receive and send texts and calls from a browser too.