Private group messaging apps are hot. The Monday after Skype acquired year-old startup GroupMe for a reported $85 million, a team of innovators who lead the ultimately unsuccessful but very important charge to popularize RSS feeds has regrouped to build and launch a new group messaging app called Glassboard.
Glassboard launched in the iTunes, Android and Windows Phone app stores this morning and it's a good, solid, simple app for communicating across multiple different topical "boards" on your phone. If you've got a group of people you want to communicate with for a short or long period of time, from your phone, with commenting, media and location sharing, then Glassboard could be the app for you.
This week we're running a 5-part series of posts looking back on the significant trends of 2011. Today we're reviewing group messaging, the hot trend at this year's SXSW festival. Group messaging started out as a battle between several startups, but over the past few months it's turned into a fascinating Google vs. Facebook vs. Microsoft faceoff.
Group messaging threatened to become a breakout activity at SXSW, as tweeting and 'checking in' had done at previous SXSW events. It didn't quite pan out that way, partly because a giant (Facebook) acquired one of the leading scrappy startups before things got interesting. Also, there were minor but irritating glitches with the apps. A few months on and group messaging is no longer as hyped as it was at SXSW. Yet it's more than ever a key feature in the social and mobile products of Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
Technical documentation platform provider MindTouch tonight announced an interesting new feature in its flagship product: MindTouch Contextual Help. The feature offers the ability to integrate collaboratively written documentation inline into web and desktop application interfaces, instead of only publishing it as a standalone document elsewhere. In contrast, forums, PDFs and other standalone Help systems are "antiquated" and see low user engagement, the company says.
This would be quite a development for any Content Management System but it's even more intriguing when considered in light of MindTouch's initial product years ago: an open source Wiki that could display dynamic, programmatically piped-in data from 3rd party services. In a way, Mindtouch is still that - but nine months ago the company launched a platform specifically intended to serve customers building technical support documents. From the ultimate in wide open publishing technology, Mindtouch has now focused on infusing the same type of functionality into the interfaces of more traditionally created software. You might say it's a story of Read/Write technology growing up. Will it work? If it doesn't trade too much simplicity for this newfound sophistication, it very well could.
You know a company is all grown up and ready to take on the world when it makes its first acquisition. Well, fine, maybe raising $10.6 million last January counts too, but today leading group messaging app GroupMe announced that it had acquired small application developer Sensobi for an undisclosed amount.
The acquisition will bring Sensobi's co-founders onto the GroupMe team and likely include incorporating Sensobi's contact ranking and alert technologies into GroupMe, which hints at some interesting potential for the group messaging app.
Open source social network framework Elgg (like WordPress for Facebooks) is now supported by social media client app Seesmic, according to an announcement on the Seesmic blog this morning. With the addition of the Elgg plug-in, Seesmic users can now view and update multiple Elgg networks in the same interface they use for Twitter, Facebook, Ning and numerous others. That's good news for Seesmic, which is in a very competitive market.
Elgg is good for groups interested in creating niche networks under their own control, either publicly or privately. The service can run on your own servers or through a hosted version just launched last Summer. It came from the Education world and is used today by various organizations including Oxfam, Hill & Knowlton PR, the Australian government and the state of Ohio. Seesmic is a Salesforce-backed social network meta-service, allowing users to interact with multiple networks on multiple platforms.
The British novelist Ian McEwan said, "The naming of what is there is what is important." But there is a thing, or an idea, a system or network, that we live with every day, that we live in, that we, in point of fact, are, which has no name.
When apprehending and recognizing something new, we humans name it. Some say we name things in order to control them and there might be some truth to that. But who would not elect to control an earthquake than be controlled by one?
Our information gathering network has changed out of recognition, but its taxonomy has lagged behind. We need to name this new network, and we would like the readership of ReadWriteWeb to help us.
Trumba, the shared calendar and events communications software company has added the ability for users to attach "custom objects" to their Web calendars and other websites. These "objects" are in essence tables that unfold graphically, keyed to links, or can stand on their own as pages.
Trumba's customers use the company's software to publish interlinked calendars and provide other modular features to their websites. Clients include media companies like the New York Times and Ottaway Newspapers, academic institutions like Kansas State and Emory Universities, and groups like the City of Seattle and the New Orleans Saints.
Mark Fletcher builds software, that's just what he does. He may have sold the system that became Yahoo Groups for $400 million, and then made millions selling Bloglines to Ask.com as well, but that doesn't mean he's going to stop making software. And it's not just any software he makes, either. Those two projects changed millions of peoples' lives.
Tomorrow morning Fletcher will unveil his newest creation, a lightweight group communication tool called SnapGroups. We first wrote about it two weeks ago but hadn't been able to take a look until tonight. We're happy to report that you're probably going to like it a lot: it's easy, it's clear, it's got good social design and it's real time. Check out the screenshots below.
Six months after announcing her decision to step down from four years of daily responsibilities at productivity mega-blog Lifehacker, Gina Trapani will announce today that she is joining San Diego based Pelotonics to advise the company on both product development and marketing. Trapani's trusted voice has reviewed thousands of websites, services and workflows that aim to help people get more done online - so her decision to join a company in that market is one of the strongest endorsements we can imagine.
Pelotonics describes itself as a group collaboration system built with "an eye toward adding certain intuitive pieces of functionality that Basecamp did not and would not launch." We wrote about the company once before, when it integrated popular note taking service Evernote into its software.
Backboard, a sophisticated online solution for gathering feedback about various types of documents, came out of public beta this morning. Backboard allows users to upload and comment on standard Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, but it also supports most standard graphics formats, including PhotoShop, and gives users the ability to mark up and comment on web pages. Backboard is geared towards a wide range of users, including freelancers as well as enterprise customers, and it is one of the easiest to use feedback and approval systems we have seen in a long time.
