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.

The team behind Glassboard includes RSS veterans NetNewsWire creator Brent Simmons, FeedDemon creator Nick Bradbury and Newsgator's VP of Mobile and Data Walker Fenton. When social media was first bursting onto the scene with the self-publishing power of the first blogging platforms, it was RSS innovators like Simmons, Bradbury and Fenton, along with Google Reader leaders Jason Shellen and Chris Wetherell (now both at AOL) that really made blogging scale by building the web apps that let millions of people subscribe easily to tens or hundreds of millions of blogs.

Sadly, listening meaningfully to other people will never be as popular as babbling about yourself or drooling, so RSS reading applications didn't explode like subsequent technologies have. They have changed the lives of millions of people, though, and continue to power important work behind the scenes throughout a still-democratizing media world.

These days it's Group Messaging that's hot though, and it's surely more accessible than RSS. As I wrote when previewing the Glassboard app earlier this Summer:

"It is built with Microsoft Azure as its back-end and will integrate with Microsoft's forthcoming Office 365. The team is being intentionally 'agnostic' about its target market, saying it could be used by families, work teams or companies and their clients. These guys have built some incredible things in the past and it will be very interesting to see what they can bring to one of the biggest potential markets of the day."

The app is now live and in limited testing, I've been impressed with it so far. It reminds me a lot of Beluga, the group messaging client scooped up by Facebook this Spring, except it's better set up for small groups of people you already know than it is big public group chatter like Beluga is sometimes used for. One of the differentiators is that Glassboard uses the News Feed model to display activity updates from all your different group conversations.

Clearly Skype and Microsoft think that mobile group messaging is going to be an important part of the tech landscape of the future. Glassboard is a solid entrant into that market, led by a very high-caliber team.

Why Group Messaging Matters

As David Card, Research Director at GigaOM Pro, wrote this Spring:

"Synchronous communications (such as mobile group chat) are the latest battleground in the war over unified communications, but no matter how clever and fun those apps are, they're not the real contenders. Rather, technology platform players like Google, Microsoft and Facebook are fighting to see what company supplies a user's communications control panel - and a scrappy Skype can't be ignored either."

Why are these apps so hot right now? I think it's in part because they capture the same feeling that one to one SMS and MMS capture, but on a whole new level with multiple people. It's a paradigm that's both simple and highly engaging.

Om Malik wrote in February that good group messaging apps could hold the key to Google effectively challenging Facebook in social technology. Their synchronous Interactions are "highly personal, are location-aware and allow the sharing of experiences, whether it's photographs, video streams or simply smiley faces. Interactions are supposed to mimic the feeling of actually being there. Interactions are about enmeshing the virtual with the physical."

That described Glassboard well, too; and so far the app looks like a clean, simple, fast way to accomplish those goals that are common among group messaging apps.

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.

The SXSW Battle of Group Messaging Apps

Cut to late February 2011. A couple of weeks before SXSW Interactive, the biggest Internet technology event of the year. Many people are licking their lips in anticipation of the upcoming battle of the group messaging startups. Beluga vs. GroupMe vs. Yobongo vs. Kik vs. all comers!

And then Facebook goes and ruins it all by acquiring Beluga before a SXSW shot has been fired.

Beluga and GroupMe ended up the most popular of the group messaging apps in Austin, however neither caught on in a big way.

Enter... Google Plus

We mentioned yesterday that Google Plus, the new social network from Google, has forced Facebook to re-evaluate its privacy options. Google Plus has also upped the ante in group messaging.

Google Plus has two excellent group messaging features. The first is a group video chat feature called 'Hangouts,' which got a lot of attention on launch because it enables up to 10 people to participate. The second feature is much more akin to Beluga and GroupMe. It's a mobile-only group texting feature called 'Huddle.'

Facebook Responds... But Where's Beluga?

Just a week after Google Plus launched, Facebook announced its own video chat and group messaging features. The video chat part is powered by Skype, but it's limited to one-to-one video chat (so it's not a 'group' chat feature).

Facebook's group messaging feature is likewise underwhelming when compared to Google Plus. It's not available on their mobile apps, for a start. Also it's limited to chatting with official Facebook 'groups' (which aren't very well used, because they're a user experience mess) or by going through some unintuitive steps in the Facebook chat interface. In short, Facebook's group chat is badly designed.

Where is Beluga in all of this? So far nowhere to be seen. Ironically, there are reports of technical problems with Beluga on its Facebook Page. One assumes Facebook will integrate Beluga at some point though - surely it has to in order to keep up with Google.

We should also mention the group messaging functionality in Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's latest mobile offering. Its "People Hub" enables you to chat with groups of people, much like Huddle does.

What is Your Favorite Group Messaging App?

Overall, it's been a fascinating year for group messaging. It started out as a battle between several tiny startups, but by mid-year it's turned into a battleground for the big guns: Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. Let us know your favorite group messaging app in the comments!

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.

MindTouch says its new contextual help for apps feature is like "an F1 button for the cloud era" - offering users instant pop-ups of Help information contextual to where they find themselves in an app. The MindTouch platform is a Content Management System that allows technical writers to create, edit and manage that Help content - now it can be integrated directly into the apps themselves without regularly engaging engineers or designers. In other words, just like so many other Web 2.0 tools - this system aims to lower the technical barrier to entry to publishing and managing a certain kind of content - in this case documentation offered right inline with other content and functionality (apps) with much higher technical requirements to product.

The only risk I can see at first glance is that by putting the content creation activity in one interface and the resulting publishing activity in another interface, delivered across disparate and non-linear screens, there may be some increase in mental overhead when compared to publishing whole, singular, linear Help documents. That's just for the documentation publisher, though - it seems quite clear that offering this documentation contextually and inline is likely to lower the investment required by those who would read it. MindTouch has argued for several years that improved user experiences for readers of technical manuals, for example, delivered clear business value to the companies that published those manuals.

The system offers analytics about what kinds of Help app users invoke and MindTouch says that includes opportunities to up-sell. The Contextual Help product starts at $2000 per year.

Open, collaborative, self-publishing technologies revolutionized the web over the past 10 years. For them to integrate themselves and their benefits into the rest of the world may be their next big challenge.

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.

"Sensobi was one of the first companies to recognize that your true social network is on your mobile phone," explained GroupMe in its announcement. "When we met Sensobi co-founders Ajay Kulkarni and Andy Cheung several months ago, we realized that we all shared the same vision: to help you stay in touch with your real life social network."

Can Tech Mimic Life?

All group messaging apps - and GroupMe is no exception - have suffered from a particular problem. Social groups can morph quickly over time, but the group within the app may not keep up. If a group is formed entirely around communicating around an event, but you leave and go home early, you're still part of the group and continue receiving messages.

Could Sensobi's technology potentially keep track of who is taking place and interacting and who isn't and possibly cut off alerts, automatically, so as to make the group morph with real-life circumstances? Could GroupMe create elastic groups, similar to the elastic social graphs promised by Color, the app that creates social connections according to proximity and interpersonal interactions?

Could Sensobi help GroupMe more closely mimic group dynamics? Possibly so. It will be interesting to see where this could go.

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.

Neither of Seesmic's leading competitors, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, appear to support Elgg to date.

Leading social business analyst firm Altimeter published a research report last month about this sector of apps, which it calls social media management systems. That report identified 28 leading vendors. Altimeter's Jeremiah Owyang writes about the market:

"Social Media Management Systems... which help companies manage, maintain, and measure thousands of social media accounts, [and] are the next growth market for the social business category. While saturation is at 58% of corporate buyers, the average deal size is a meager $22,000 but will expect to grow to six figure annual deals in coming quarters to meet market demand.

White label social networks, like Elgg, are plentiful as well. ReadWriteWeb has done two in-depth interviews with Elgg co-founder David Tosh over the past 4 years. Tosh is now "experimenting" on a stealth project called Bluejac.

Below, a screenshot of an Elgg community accessed via Seesmic.

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.

Before the media, even the new media, got it, we had read it on Twitter. ReadWriteWeb has written before on the ability of this new tool, and others like it, to gather and disseminate information.

In the course of this discussion, we came to a surprising realization. Twitter was no more the issue than the so-called mainstream media was. We were beyond all of that now. Our network was not restricted to three news channels, or the cable news networks, or a handful of social media websites or thousands of Facebook accounts, or even all of those things taken as a whole. Our access to information, our ability to exchange it, was no longer bound by anything at all, with the possible exception of time. The reason for this sea-change is that we ourselves have in part become the system formerly we only used. We have become the fulcrum of our own network. Prometheus is well and truly unbound.

This network, the one that connects us to virtually every part of the world, to every person on the globe, branches like a Mandelbrot set. It consists of computing devices from desktop computers to laptops to tablets to phones; it consists of every program written to run those devices, every website and service that helps us to process and move the truths we witness or create; it consists of cell towers and server farms; it consists of social media tools and word processing programs; but above all it consists of, it is powered by, human beings, both singularly and in aggregate, minds and mind.

Our network is alive.

But it needs a name, and we don't have one. Jokingly, one of us called it The Culture. It isn't. It isn't even a culture. Just a network. But a vast one, a possibly game-changing one and, above all, a nameless one, one which we should control rather than allow to control us.

Help us assert control over an exciting, but daunting reality. What should this global network, this lace of machine and human, location, data and feeling, thought and thing, observer and observed, speaker and listener, be called?

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.

"To quickly grasp the idea of an Object, think of it as a table. Each record is represented by a row. Each attribute is represented by a column. Because Objects are tables, you can use them to store any collection of data that you might want to publish on your website."

Dan Hickman, Trumba's president, wrote us:

"Some of our competitors offer a canned venue or performer features that let you track and publish that information along with your calendar but our custom objects feature lets you create any type of content that might be associated with your events. The feature can even be used to publish a connected database of information that's not even related to your calendar."

Examples include attaching venue descriptions and pictures to events, to provide detailed listings of departments in a sleekly retrievable fashion and the ability to solicit and utilize user-generated content.

Disclosure: The author helped Trumba start their first blog many years ago.

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.

Update: Just after we posted this, Fletcher says he's lifted the password from the site and it's live!

SnapGroups makes it really easy to create a group discussion around a particular topic, invite people, set variable privacy controls and then participate in that conversation as part of a whole "newsfeed" style stream of updates from all your various groups in one place. Fresh comments, likes and dislikes get pushed to your browser live using a home-made bit of AJAX and the whole thing couldn't be much simpler. It's a lot of fun to use, in fact.

Fletcher says this is only the beginning, that all kinds of features are still to come, but he's focused on the basics for now. He started working on the site in October and says his favorite part of the project was "learning about the new technologies that have sprung up in the past couple years." "The various databases that have come out recently are great," he told us. "I'm using Mongo, but there are many interesting projects now." The core of the site is written in C++.

Fletcher says SnapGroups will go live tomorrow morning. You should try it out when it does. Invites to groups will no doubt be flying around Twitter and Facebook. It may very well become something you want to use regularly. Hopefully there will be a way to export your conversations easily. Fletcher is a pretty straightforward guy and will probably implement just about anything that enough people ask for and that isn't too hard to do.

Mark Fletcher has a habit of building relatively simple things, like the first major email list system and the first popular RSS reader, that end up being a defining player in the rise of a new era online. Simple, real-time group communication? Not at all hard to imagine that being a big new thing as well.

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.

It's exciting to ponder what Pelotonics plus Trapani will come up with. When it comes to web based productivity, Trapani literally wrote the book on it. She now writes regularly at a personal blog called Smarterware.

For the sake of disclosure, and because it's interesting, I should note that Pelotonics is a past client of my consulting practice (I have no ongoing financial interest in the company). One of the first things I advised Pelotonics' Troy Malone to do was reach out to Gina Trapani - it was easy advice to give as their work couldn't be more related, both live in San Diego and Gina is among the nicest people in the industry. For the firmly un-opportunistic author to join the company is a real surprise, though.

Anyone interested in the future of workplace collaboration will now be all the more well served by keeping an eye on Pelotonics.

After a document has been uploaded, users can easily set different security settings, and decide if a document will be available for printing or download. Backboard allows its users to decide if they want a document to be available only to invited reviewers, or if the documents Backboard page should be secured with a password. The document can also just be hidden behind a 'secret' URL.

Where Backboard stands out, though, is in how easy the application makes it to leave feedback. Reviewers can simply use a virtual pen to mark a document up in Backboard's excellent document viewer, or, in a text document, they can highlight parts of the text, and a form for leaving comments will automatically pop up (this feature feels a bit similar to Word 2007). Thanks to this stripped-down but powerful user interface, even an inexperienced user should be able to open a document and start reviewing it within minutes.

Comments appear in real-time in a sidebar on the right. To enable these real-time comments, Backboard has partnered with Orbited.

Another feature that makes Backboard stand out is its close integration with Microsoft Office 2007 and Apple's iWork productivity apps. After installing the respective plugins, Backboard users can easily upload documents to the service from within their productivity apps.

Pricing Plans

Backboard features an interesting pricing model. Unlike some of its competitors, all pricing tiers feature unlimited document storage, but the tiers are differentiated by the maximum file size of these documents, number of users on the account, and security features. The free version, for example, is limited to documents smaller than 5 MB (which should still be enough for all but the most complex documents) and doesn't feature a secure SSL connection. Users who use the free account also won't be able to restrict access to a document to specific users. Paid plans start at $6 a month for one user and $25 for teams of up to five members.

Backboard also features a special 'proofing' plan for freelancers who do client-facing work, which allows users to add their own branding and a custom URL. This plan starts at $10 for one user.

Feedback Made Easy

We have seen a lot of interesting collaborative feedback products that are quite similar to Backboard, but a lot of them are geared more towards freelancers. Backboard is definitely a great tool for this group of users as well, but at the same time, it is also geared towards groups in the enterprise. In many ways, it is this degree of flexibility that makes this tool so powerful. While the company isn't necessarily marketing its tool this way, Backboard could also be a great tool for giving feedback in a school or college setting, where students often write multiple drafts and teachers spend a lot of their time marking up papers.

Thanks to its focus on security, Backboard will surely be attractive to security-conscious businesses as well, and the company will also happily work with its enterprise customers to implement solutions that comply with HIPPA and other industry-specific regulations.

Overall, Backboard turned out to be one of the most flexible and easy to use tools of its kind, and if you are looking for a better solution for gathering feedback and getting approval for documents, it is most definitely worth a try.

Group collaboration startup Pelotonics has turned Evernote into an easy way to load photos, voice messages, notes and other media into your project management system, including from a mobile device.

When we first reviewed Evernote, we said it didn't live up to its incredible promise. Despite our concerns, scores of other people love the powerful note taking system. Check out these usecase videos below to see what Pelotonics has done with it.

Does that look like something you might use? We suspect that for many people it may be. Here at ReadWriteWeb we try to use Basecamp as much as we can, though we regularly come back to simpler tools like email and IM. For organizations looking for more heavyweight web-based collaboration tools, this Pelotonics/Evernote combo might work great.

Now we're even more excited to see what else developers can do with the well-built Evernote API.

Disclosure: The author had a past consulting relationship with Pelotonics but has no ongoing financial interest in the company. We just wrote about this because it looks awesome.

Developers can build their own apps for free or for sale and Zoho allows them to keep 100% of the revenue from app sales. Are these apps for real? It's hard to say. We really like the idea, but Zoho is a complicated company.

As can be imagined, there's a wide range of quality in the apps in the marketplace today. In its announcement Zoho says that more than 100,000 apps have been created with its Zoho Creator database program, but it appears that only about 300 of those are included in the marketplace at launch.

It's hard to know how to find the best apps, to know which ones are effectively duplicates and we expect those issues to continue as developers flock to the platform. It's one thing to rustle through scores of sheep kissing apps on Facebook, or shiny GPS baubles in the iPhone platform - it's another to try and find apps in an office marketplace to run your business on.

Some of the app demos were loading only intermittently during our evaluation and that's not a good sign for something users are going to do business with.

Some, like HelpDesk, look strikingly robust. Others, like the very similar Issue Tracker, look downright insufficient - Issue Tracker's bug tracking app doesn't offer reporting as far as we could tell, for example.

Most of the apps in the marketplace right now are free. The variety of apps available is interesting; one called Camp Registration facilitates registration for events, includes an hour of customization and costs $150. That app can be embedded on any other website. This and all the apps in the marketplace offer a demonstration you can view before installing.

To some degree your trust in Zoho marketplace apps will likely begin as a matter of faith. Readers here presumably are willing to put some amount of trust in online apps in general. There's probably a little more skepticism about Zoho apps in particular. Zoho marketplace apps, developed by people outside the company all together, will be an even further leap of faith. Whether you can make that leap will depend in part on where you started regarding online apps in the first place.

Zoho Apps in General

Google's online office apps were expected to change the world, and by some limited accounts they've begun to. Many people, though, find Google Apps too lightweight and infrequently updated.

Zoho's office suite has faced criticism about being too lightweight but no one can say they are too infrequently updated. A July report from analyst firm the 451 Group reported that Zoho was slowing down on new product roll out and would be focusing on improvement of existing apps. That prediction appears now to be incorrect, but the rest of 451's analysis of Zoho is very useful. "At present, there's still something of a work-in-progress feel about Zoho, with some key functionalities still to come," report authors China Martens and Anne Nielsen wrote.

Ask any major CRM vendor who they're keeping an eye on in their rearview mirror, and Zoho will be among the first players they name. That's pretty impressive for a vendor that has largely relied on word of mouth and user experimentation to gain notice...The company is already well positioned to address the increasing app pricing and integration pressures from customers and has made some initial strides in establishing channel sales.

According to another report from analyst firm Yankee Group though, Zoho already offers a better enterprise collaboration suite than Google. That report tracks 16 collaboration suites head to head, further comparison results still pending.

Zoho tells a good story and is certainly an exciting company to watch, but sometimes the story gets a little more oomph than it deserves. Oliver Marks at ZDNet, for example, wrote this week that a story floating around the blogosphere that General Electric dropped Google Apps in favor of Zoho was not in fact true. Marks reports that GE is still evaluating both services and hasn't made a decision yet about either.

Conclusion: These Apps Will Work for Many People, But Not All

We love platforms, good ones are fascinating in their fecundity even if they are complicated for providers and participants. Zoho does have a lot of momentum in the small business world, so we expect there to be a lot of international developer interest. Will customers come to Zoho and stay? The price and selection are hard to beat so the company will likely win customers for whom those are primary concerns. Would-be customers who prioritize robustness may have a more mixed experience, depending on the apps they select from the marketplace.

Update:After 45 minutes of downtime, Google Docs appears to be back up.

To be fair it appears that Google Docs has only gone down longer than a few minutes a few times since the service launched. The service is generally very reliable, the collaboration features are useful and it's free for consumer use. If those few service outages cost your company a substantial amount of money or inconvenience, that may be too much down time though.

On the other hand, maybe serious business never had any place on Google Docs in the first place. What do you think?

We appreciate your input; this is an important question and reading your replies will give us something to do while we wait for access to our docs to return. We probably should have enabled Google Gears.

New York based technology and consulting firm Arc90 introduced its first publicly available product today: Kindling. Arc90 describes Kindling as an "idea management and collaboration tool for small groups and companies." A more straightforward way to describe it would be as a version of Digg or reddit for small groups. Unlike those sites, however, Kindling focuses purely on voting on original ideas, not news stories.

Kindling puts an interesting twists on its voting scheme. Users only get 10 votes to give away at any given time and they can distribute those freely among different ideas.

Kindling is split into three main sections: voting, submitting ideas, and 'making it happen.'

The voting and commenting on new ideas is about as simple as it can get, with the exception of the 10 vote constraint. Arc90 says the limited amount of votes is meant to make users more picky about what to vote for, ultimately making every vote more meaningful. While users can always take votes away from a project themselves, once an idea is approved or rejected, all votes are returned to the user to replenish their supply.

The 'make it happen' section of the site displays the status of all the different ideas that have been submitted, but it also allows users to take charge of an idea by assigning it to themselves.

Kindling's user interface is simple and elegant. The minimalist design philosophy of the voting process extends to the rest of the application. The submission form, for example, is about as stripped down as possible.

Democracy at Work

Kindling is taking an interesting approach to small group collaboration. While it is not trying to be a complete project management application like Zoho Projects or Basecamp, and far less complex in its execution than its direct competitor IdeaScale (we wrote about them here), I could see it work very well in a small organization or even an informal group. For the voting system to work well, Arc90 recommends to have at least six members in a group - but there doesn't seem to be an upper limit.

Beta Invites

During the beta period, Kindling is going to be free, after that, beta testers will get reduced pricing for a year once the paid version launches.

Update: We have now given out all of our invites. If you would still like to get one, you can sign up for one on the Kindling homepage.

We have 50 invites for Kindling to give away. Just leave a comment below and we will get back to you ASAP. Note: if you use OpenID to comment, we can not see your email address.

Written by Ebrahim Ezzy and edited by Richard MacManus.

The term groupware refers to applications that facilitate real-time communication, coordination and collaboration amongst groups of people. A number of startups are working hard to develop the nascent groupware market, so in this post we identify some of those startups and provide an overview of where the market is heading. 

What is Groupware?

Groupware has existed (in various forms) since the invention of email. What is new now is the way that groupware is available on every web-enabled PC - through desktop clients such as Groove, Colligo, SocialText (Enterprise Edition) or web-based suites like Joyent, Zimbra, Atlassian, Goowy (Enterprise), and many others.

Current groupware offerings combine personal and group work management. They provide personal project execution and work management tools - including chat systems, meeting schedulers, messaging, conferencing, whiteboards, etc. What all these things have in common is that they facilitate groups working together.

Social Groupware

As a recent poll suggested, 70% of you prefer niche social networks connectable via a meta social network, over a giant centralized social network with thousands of members. We're calling the former Social Groupware and the latter Social Networks.

Social groupware products allow the creation of remotely hosted user-groups, special-interest groups - or any other group of like-minded people who share similar passions, interests and goals. 

CommonGate is a relatively new social groupware that allows creation of communal weblogs - or "theme-based communities" as they refer to them. Here is an example of a community for web 2.0.

SixApart's Vox launched recently - it is a personal blogging service with privacy controls, so that family and friends only can view the content. It also has hooks into some popular web services, such as Flickr, Photobucket and YouTube.

Enterprise Groupware

Enterprise groupware enables more effective interaction with networked information systems. Groupware products are becoming increasingly important in the marketplace because:

• They help businesses to work more efficiently with improved use of resources.
• They permit better coordination of activities by reducing/eliminating time and space barriers, and speeding business processes.  
• There is an organizational movement from personal computing to work-group or team-based collaboration, with the idea that it'll improve productivity.

Groupware and collaboration tools help businesses a lot - and what's more they have never been so cheaply available.

Examples include Atlassian, SocialText, Groove, Colligo, TeamDirection, Joyent, TeamSpace, Zimbra, ZohoX. We will review these in detail in a separate post.

Virtual Teams and Groupware

Many service professionals believe and rely on the common adage that "50% of success is just showing up" - not considering the future virtual workplace in mind. However, these days, letting information workers not show up is becoming a key ingredient to competitive success.

Everything of the Web 2.0 era can be traced to the advances brought about by collaborating teams of distributed participants, whose primary mode of interaction was virtual. 

Smart employers know they have a far better chance of hiring the best talents if they don't expect all of them to be located in the same place. For example 37signals, the popular web 2.0 company that developed winners like Basecamp and Backpack, spreads out over 4 cities and 8 time zones. From Provo Utah to Copenhagen Denmark. In this 24x7 world, geographically dispersed virtual teams like those at 37signals are at an advantage.

Groupware makes it possible for these virtual teams to keep precise track of project status, maintain complete communications records, monitor deadlines and outstanding problems that need attention, and manage tasks that must be completed in certain sequences, etc. 

As a result of groupware, virtual teams are quicker, smarter and often more productive than conventional teams working in a typical workplace. 

Communication tools

A major portion of work in any business is tied to communications of different types. Taking advantage of enterprise groupware technologies for communications, businesses can drastically improve on productivity, efficiency and ultimately profitability. Let's quickly review some of these technologies:

Email; has been the principal form of communication and a strong driver of productivity and efficiency for most businesses. Enterprise Groupware takes email to the next level by providing structured email communication, that automates and improves business processes and increases workflow productivity.

Chat; once considered taboo in the workplace, is now the standard form of communication after email. It enables faster responses, quicker problem resolutions and effective team management.

Weblog; enables businesses and entrepreneurs to share information instantly and frequently - and reach out to their customers in a more casual manner. Weblogs are also effective in educating potential customers and engaging them in two-way conversations around related topics.  

Conferencing; allows individuals to communicate and create virtual learning or meeting environments online, instantaneously with anyone - anywhere, at anytime. Most services enable participants to share documents, applications, web sites or even presentations with others.

Collaboration tools

People working alongside one another as in a typical workplace - learning and interacting with each other in order to get smarter - is not collaboration. It can just result in blind-leading-the-blind. Collaboration requires goals and is maximally effective when it results in the creation of a communal mind. The possibilities of innovation, efficiency, and productivity are endless only when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Collaborative groupware applications are designed to streamline project management and workflow systems; and allow collaboration on processes like inventory management, customer service, project and task management. This collaborative environment enables virtual teams to plan, organize, innovate and drive projects to completion in a timely fashion.

Workflow systems; most sophisticated Content Management Systems have workflow, which manages "how tasks are structured and who performs them, what their relative order is, how they are synchronized, how information flows to support the tasks and how tasks are being tracked."

Office Suites; bundles up various office applications - increasingly as a web-based suite.

Project & task management; helps establish clear and explicit expectations - along with establishing goals, timetables and methods - for monitoring progress.

Personal & shared calendars; helps team members keep track of tasks, appointments, deadlines, plan and schedule initiatives; and since they aren’t hand-written, there’s less room for misinterpretation.

Future outlook

Having evolved over the past several decades, the time is ripe for groupware. The potential of groupware applications to greatly enhance efficiencies in personal and business operations is driving widespread interest in them.

What's more it will continue to evolve as time progresses - and new and different demands are made on applications being used within the realms of group interaction.

Conclusion

Overall, groupware has changed the way people communicate and the way business is conducted.

It has facilitated the creation, management and sharing of information though various channels of communication. This communication and collaboration when applied, sums up to a highly productive and shared environment which accelerates productivity. It also facilitates easier management of files, documents, and data in general.

Groupware will always remain only as strong as the abilities of the people who use it. But when groupware is successful, the benefits accrued are dramatic.