This, of course, is more of a company culture problem than anything Yammer can control. Yammer continues to grow, and the enterprise social network space is where companies who are conceding truly social networking dominance to Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, will seek to grow.

Yammer is an enterprise social network and becoming increasingly popular for publishers to set up virtual newsrooms. While it has often been described as "Twitter behind a firewall" because of its use of hash tags, Yammer has more of a Facebook feel, in my opinion, down to being able to "like" messages left by co-workers.

At Daily Dot, Yammer was used to assign and claim stories, get feedback, request that a story be posted to the Web site and, occasionally, receive a semi-public tongue lashing from an editor (the justification I was given when I complained about having all of my idiosyncrasies discussed in front of my virtual co-workers was that, as a startup, everyone else could learn from my mistakes).

But, the occasional flame war with an editor not withstanding, the worst part of working on Yammer is the same as the worst part of socializing on Facebook: those emo-updates on Facebook from someone you haven't spoken to in years about a recent breakup and baby photos of some half-forgotten high school friend often bury the important stuff. And on Yammer, that important stuff is often information you need to do your job properly. There is no virtual water cooler in Yammer, meaning all the idle chit-chat is happening in your virtual cubicle.

On more than one occasion this chatter meant an #editrequest would get buried and missed, meaning an editor would not see, read and post a story that would have otherwise beaten our competitors. Sometimes these requests got buried because of a legitimate flood of news; other times, however, they got buried because of a flood of #snaps (Daily Dot's preferred hash tag for self-congratulatory chatter when a story got picked up by a bigger news outlet).

The other big drawback about Yammer? In my experience, it actually discouraged one-on-one communication.

ReadWriteWeb uses Skype, which has chat rooms that can be used for getting input on stories, discussing coverage and leads and, yes, going off on the occasional personal life update. But co-workers can also contact one another directly, either via instant message or voice, and that dramatically improves how people relate to one another. Daily Dot did use Campfire as a chat client, but it was another site to log into and if the person you needed to speak with wasn't logged in when you were, you were out of luck.

Is Skype the perfect back-end enterprise solution? Of course not, nor is Yammer completely flawed. The big takeaway from all of this is no matter what system your firm implements, its has to be done thoughtfully and updated frequently until it is perfect, or at least less flawed.

Today's update brought Hangouts to mobile devices, and it added "On Air" mode to allow users to broadcast to the public (once On Air opens to everyone, that is). All these features sound like fun. But the killer app on Google Plus is more about work than play. Google Docs is now available live over Hangouts, making live, face-to-face collaboration possible on the Web for free.

With screensharing and a shared sketchpad, and especially with Docs, Google Plus is now a platform for making stuff together, face-to-face. It's the first Plus feature that's categorically different than anything Facebook can do. Facebook surely has a bunch of exciting things to announce this week, but there's no chance any of them will go in this direction. Google Docs is it as far as cloud-powered collaboration goes - outside of the pricey enterprise market - and that team is killing it lately with new features. Google Plus Hangouts are now a natural place for people to work remotely together. Can you believe that these capabilities are free? There aren't even ads on it yet!

Plus for the Enterprise?

So, does that mean enterprise collaboration suites like Citrix or WebEx are in danger? Probably not. For one thing, unfortunately, Plus access for Google Apps accounts is not among the first 100 features, so Google's actual enterprise customers are still locked out. Presumably, though, that access will come, and while it won't be free, the Google Apps suite is pretty darn affordable by enterprise standards. Are the Hangouts tools powerful enough? Maybe not for everyone, but certainly for the vast majority of work tasks. Can Google Plus change corporate culture? That's a good question, and it depends whether Google wants to take the product in that direction.

Best of all, though: Google also began to open the Hangouts API to developers today, so independent geniuses everywhere can start expanding the possibilities.

Would you use Google Plus Hangouts for work? Let us know in the comments.

"For Office 15 we're building new products to deliver integration of instant messaging/presence with social networks such as Facebook," the company wrote in a job posting put online today. Stephen Chapman first reported on the news at ZDNet and said he found it bewildering. Not everyone feels that way, though; to some observers it makes perfect sense.

What do you think, readers? Do you think that integrating the Facebook and work social graphs will be a net positive for work productivity? It could be a great way to leverage our social connections while we work, a practice that could become increasingly important in a more social, always connected world. Instant messaging is one thing, but Presence Data is another: imagine knowing who that you know is available to answer a question at a given moment. That could be a very valuable asset in the workplace.

Or is this a desperate attempt by Microsoft to stay relevant in the future, at the expense of real work and most peoples' preference to separate work and personal lives? It's a fascinating question, I think.

Microsoft launched a browser-based version of Office called Docs.com, with extensive Facebook integration, nearly one year ago. When the new Facebook Groups feature was rolled out, Docs.com supported it as well. It's not clear that site has been widely adopted.

There's some HTML5 and some advanced CSS in the app. There are more powerful alternatives available online, but if you don't already use one of them - why not give this one a try? Check out the screencast demo below.

Feel free to chuckle about the irony of Chalk being free, while the company's similar product Draft costs $9.99 in the App Store. Co-founder Jason Fried even wrote an article about the audacity of charging for software. That article ran on Inc. only yesterday.

Following the cease-and-desist letter, officials also emailed the students at all 23 universities in the Cal State system, warning them that selling their class notes online "including on the NoteUtopia website, is subject to discipline, up through and including expulsion from the university."

Fostering (and Fearing) Student Collaboration

Stevens says that NoteUtopia has complied with the letter, adding verbiage to the site to warn Cal State students. But he's not pleased with the message that the system sent to students as he feels as though it demonized a website that offers more than just a marketplace for students' class notes. NoteUtopia is meant to function as an online community where students can share information, discuss courses and rate professors - a supplement to, not a replacement for, offline education.

Cal State students could conceivably still share their notes - bypassing the typical $1 or so charge for a set of course-notes. And education code aside, sharing is something that is happening - whether it's being actively encouraged or not - as more students are opting to collaborate and learn together online.

It's worth noting, says Stevens, that sororities and fraternities have long had systems for sharing course materials among members. NoteUtopia merely "levels the playing field," using the Internet to allow anyone to have access to this information.

Who Owns Students' Notes?

"In school," says Stevens, "we're taught that if we put things in our own words, it isn't plagiarism. So it doesn't seem like the government should be able to tell us what to do with our own handwritten notes."

Indeed, the provision of the state education code does some raise questions about intellectual property and the ownership of ideas and course content. If the students don't own their class-notes - or at least, cannot sell them commercially - who does? The professor? The university? The state?

Stevens says he's trying to enlist the help of the EFF and the ACLU to make the case for students' rights here. Regardless, even as the California State School system decrees one thing, it seems clear that more students are interested in collaborating online - whether in a free and open forum or via a marketplace like NoteUtopia.

And more and more - 2000 a day - are joining ResearchGATE, a startup that hopes to connect scientists, researchers, and scholars worldwide.

Meeting the Communication and Collaboration Needs of the Scientific Community

Initially, says Madisch, ResearchGATE offered merely profiles. But as more scientists joined - the site now has 500,000 registered users from 200 countries - features were added so that scholars could present their research and participate in Q&A groups. On ResearchGATE you can list what projects you're working on and what literature you're reading, making it easier for scholars to see what others in the field are thinking and, in the words of Madisch, making "discovering papers social."

Unlike a site like Facebook, scholars have followers, rather than just "friends," which makes sense as, say, a grad student might want to follow a prestigious scholar in her or his field, but might not be able to claim the person as a direct contact. In addition to fostering communication and collaboration among researchers working on similar projects, ResearchGATE also fosters cross-discipline collaboration, as a scholars in a variety of fields can share research results and methodologies. And it's not just "hard science," either. According to Madisch, philosophers make up one of the largest disciplines represented on the site.

ResearchGATE announces today that it has secured a Series A round of financing led by Benchmark Capital with participation from Accel Partners' Silicon Valley office and prominent investors from the UK and Germany. With the funding, ResearchGATE plans to expand its team and add new features to meet the needs of users, including calendaring and virtual conferencing.

Google may have killed Wave (prematurely by some accounts), but it has added a little bit of real-time collaboration to one of its flagship offerings, Google Docs, with the addition of collaborative highlighting.

The difference here is that it is all happening in real time. As we both look at the document and go to make changes, we see one another highlight text and add commentary. It's a step-by-step process rather than a completely asynchronous communication. It's the difference between chat and email and it makes all the difference in the interaction between writer and editor, or even editor and editor if you're collaboratively editing a document.

Wave may be dead, but we hope that Docs will begin to see more real-time collaborative tools introduced in its place.

What do you think - what other uses could you see for this sort of real-time interaction? And what other bits of Wave would you like to see revived in Docs?

The bits and pieces submitted from around the world will then be collected and built into a feature-length documentary film that will debut at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in Utah. Anyone whose footage makes it into the film will be credited as a co-director and could also be one of 20 people selected to attend the premier.

This project has enormous potential to create something truly amazing, in my opinion. YouTube is by far the largest resource for sharing and viewing video on the Web, and big name directors Scott and Macdonald should have no problem creating a compelling story from the plethora of submissions they are likely to receive.

Other projects in the past have leveraged the YouTube community to create collaborative media projects. Composer Eric Whitacre assembled a virtual "YouTube Choir" by taking submissions from users singing the various voices of a few of his choral pieces. The success of YouTube's "Life in a Day" project could be big win for crowdsourcing and the real-time Web, placing it front-and-center in the spotlight and encouraging its further evolution as a platform for multimedia collaboration.

Map the World

OpenStreetMap is what would result if Wikipedia and Google Maps made a baby. The open-source, wiki-based mapping project is leveraging crowdsourcing to create highly detailed, highly accurate maps of the world. The easiest way to get involved is to locate your community on the map and start adding items like parks, businesses, streets, landmarks and other objects to the map. Adding items is as simple as editing Wikipedia articles (which is really easy, if you haven't tried it).

Do you know of a hiking trail in your area that you can't find on OpenStreetMap? If you want to create an accurate representation of that trail, you can take a GPS device out with you on your next hike and capture the exact coordinates as you walk. Then simply hook up your GPS tracks-compatible device to your computer and upload it to OpenStreetMap.

Curate the News

Do you know how to find good journalism and want to share a curated list of high-quality stories with the rest of the world? NewsTrust, a growing community of over 15,000 consumers, journalists and educators provides a platform for users to rate and share news stories based on "facts, fairness, context and other core journalistic principles." So stop yelling at your TV when you don't agree with Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann and help the community by curating the news.

Use Social Media, Provide Rich Data

One of the best and easiest ways to participate in crowdsourcing is to simply use social media and share information on the Internet. By sharing your thoughts on Twitter, which will be come infinitely more intelligent with the launch of annotations, you can contribute to the fire hose of real-time data that researchers use every day to check the pulse of the world. Similarly, participating on services like Yelp help people crowdsource restaurant reviews. How else would I have known where to find a clam chowder bread bowl on the east side of San Francisco?

The real power lies in the data beneath the surface of various forms of social media. As mentioned above, Twitter annotations will create rich metadata from the billions of messages sent each day, but other services like Flickr have loads of metadata included with each photo. Photo data can not only include information about who took the photo, when and where, but also information about the camera, the lens, the shutter speed and lots of other photography-related metadata. Using this data, mashups can and have been made that creatively integrate Flickr photos to reveal fascinating information.

Start Your Own Project

If these projects don't float your crowdsourcing boat, create your own! If you want to help raise money for charity, Crowdrise is a great platform to get your efforts off the ground. Founded by actor Edward Norton, Crowdrise lets users create projects, share them on social networks, collect donations and send those donations off to charities. "Charities get the cash, the world is a better place, and everyone likes you more," the site says.

If that's not up your alley, try checking out one of several lists of crowdsourcing projects out there to participate in. There is an excellent list containing hundreds of examples up on the shared workspace platform PBworks where you're sure to find something to your liking. If you still want to try your hand creating your own project, check out Wikipedia's lists of recent projects for inspiration.

Photo by Flickr user Ian Ransley.

Previously, the OfficSync plugin integrated into Microsoft Office's toolbar, appearing as a new menu or tab in its ribbon interface. From here, you could choose to open, save, search or share a Microsoft Office file in any of the suite's flagship programs (Word, Excel or PowerPoint).

However, when it came to the "collaboration" aspect - the standout feature of Google Docs, OfficSync only provided the tools that gave others' access to files hosted on Google Docs. It didn't provide the real-time editing capabilities, such as those found in Google's spreadsheets program (or, as of yesterday, in Google's documents program, too).

But now, OfficSync users can use the software of their choice - Office or Docs - and their changes are sent to the other collaborators in real-time. The changes don't magically occur, keystroke by keystroke, but are pushed to others when the "Save" button is clicked in Microsoft Office or when changes to the Google Docs online version are saved. Office users will see a pop-up message informing them the file was changed and they can then preview the changes, ignore them or update the file. That message is sent in real-time to all users.

You can see the co-authoring feature in action here on YouTube. 

Other Features

In addition to the standout real-time collaboration feature, OfficSync also now includes a few other features worth mentioning too, such as:

• Support for any file type: OfficSync now supports Docs' ability to store files of any type. What this means for Office users is that you can chose to store your Office documents in their native format without "converting" them to Google Docs format. This is ideal for preserving some of the advanced formatting that Docs doesn't support.
• Improved Google Sites Support: OfficSync automatically detects all the Google Sites you have access to and lets you edit those files. You can even create new Google Sites from within Office.
• OfficSync Task Pane: A sidebar panel for Office that shows collaborators, recent documents, documents starred in Google Docs, recently shared documents and more.
• Improved Integrated Search: The new version includes improved integrated Google Search/Google Image Search functionality, available from the toolbar.
• Beta support for Office 2010, the next release of Microsoft Office software, itself still in beta, too.

To download the newly updated OfficSync plugin, visit offisync.com/download (available at approximately 12:30 PM EST today).

Our contention, however, is that while technical issues in adding media have certainly had a limiting role, is this all that has kept multimedia from dotting the pages of our favorite collaborative encyclopedia? Can video be collaborative?

We spoke today with Michael Dale, the "open-video evangelist" for Kaltura, who said that "we haven't really seen yet the collaborative sequencing aspects of the software," but that these tools are currently in development. Kaltura is the online video editing company that is working with Wikimedia to enable video on Wikipedia. Through meta data and other tools, the company is trying to make video a more collaborative media.

The "Let's Get Video on Wikipedia" page offers a simple five-step how-to on how to add video to the site, but the only thing we're thinking it's missing is the "wash, rinse, repeat" aspect of adding any content to Wikipedia. While it is rather simple to go in and edit a sentence here and a paragraph there in a text format, editing a video is not nearly as simple. There are currently around 4,500 videos on Wikimedia Commons out of about 6,300,000 images and digital assets, total.

Now videos can be easily uploaded, how will Wikipedia's users contend with the medium? If a three-minute long video is added to an article, but 30 seconds of it contain somewhat disputed ideas, interspersed through out, will these parts simply be cut? Will the whole video be scrapped or will another user take the video, slice those parts out and insert their own? And in the end, if this is the case, what sort of mish-mash multimedia will we end up with in the end? This is the next step, it would seem.

"Once there are more tools available," said Dale, "I think we'll see more experimentation."

It's not as if these questions are new to the Wikipedia community, as you can read in its proposed guidelines, which suggest that videos will should likely be limited to "snapshot-type", "performance-type" and "tour-type" videos. Even with these limitations, if you've ever looked through the history of changes on Wikipedia articles, then you know how even the finest points of an idea can be discussed and dissected.

According to a video interview with Kaltura co-founder Michal Tsur on Beet.TV, "users should be able to use video just the same way they're using text", but a word is a word is a word. A video, even a tiny bit of video, can differ in lighting, sound, angle and any number of other variables.

"The actual fact is that we're just getting started," Dale pointed out. "There's not a clear idea of how video will work and be used."

In the end, we think video sounds like a great idea, but wonder how widespread it can really become on a platform that holds collaboration in such high esteem. Whether or not video collaboration takes off on Wikipedia, we would love to see what could be created within other contexts (i.e. not encyclopedic) with the collaborative video tools that Dale says are currently in development.

From massively multiplayer Q&A app Quora to invite-only, group-scrapbooking tool TwitAlbums to developer-centric, code-coaching resource Squad, the web is rife with sites focused on making groups more communicative and more efficient. Teambox has popped up on our radar as "a Twitter-like project collaboration tool," and it fits right in with this trend.

Communications occur through threaded topics. Participants in a conversation are notified via email when their topic is updated. Tasks are updated in series of comments and act as to-dos that can be assigned, modified and completed.

The app further allows for sharing files of any size, and profile pages allow supervisors or others to see what a particular user has been working on lately.

The Twitter-like UX is familiar and fast, and the interface seems simultaneously lightweight and robust. For project management and team collaboration - including distributed teams - we can see this application going over very well.

Best of all, Teambox is a free and open source project. The app is built using Ruby on Rails, and while the web version of the app is perfect for small- or medium-size teams, larger companies can host Teambox on their own servers - which might also be good news for users and admins concerned with data security.

These distinctions set Teambox apart from Basecamp, a popular product from 37signals that also provides web-based project management tools.

Although the web app is completely free, Teambox also offers paid features, such as server installation for self-hosting, customer support and white-label versions.

What do you think? Is Teambox's Twitter/Basecamp mashup something you could use at your company or for a group side project? Let us know what you think of the application in the comments.

Or, for a bonus round of backstory, check out the ReadWriteWeb Spain interview with founder Pablo Villalba.

FlockDraw offers a simple set of basic tools: freehand drawing, lines, eraser and text. You can also change the color and size of your font or pencil. There are no fancy tools here, but what is there is more than enough to draw a quick sketch. It's important to note that these FlockDraw rooms are meant to be disposable — once the last person leaves the room, the image disappears.

Two features — embedding the whiteboard and saving files — are currently disabled, though Blake tells us that they will soon return. Users will be able to save files as JPEGs, and embed the whiteboard on their social networking sites or blogs.

Overall, the service, which was founded by Dan Blake (of TinyChat fame) and Ryan Hileman, is extremely easy to use. Just head to the front page and click "Start Drawing." You can also start a new FlockDraw room by simply appending more than 3 characters to the FlockDraw URL (http://flockdraw.com/rwwwhiteboard, for example).

As reported by Australian news outlet ITNews, Wave has multiple levels of security which are designed to prevent email spoofing. Spoofing, meaning when you receive an email that claims to be from either a person or company you know but is actually from someone else - a hacker in most cases.

D'alesandre says the Wave protocol is more secure because it includes something he jokingly refers to as "crypto fairy dust." That's obviously meant to be a simple and fun way to explain the security complexities built into Wave which involve detailed authentication mechanisms to keep users safe from malicious attacks. In Wave, every bit of info you receive from another Wave user has already been authenticated as to its origin so you can be assured that they are who they say they are.

"You know you are getting the Wave from the person that is sending it to you and it has not changed mid-stream. This is a very big problem in current communication technologies - data can be changed mid stream and you will never know," said D'alesandre.

HTTPS Enabled by Default

For an additional layer of security, all Wave traffic is by default encrypted via HTTPS, a protocol for secure communications. That represents a big change in Google's standard policy regarding use of this protocol. It wasn't until July of 2008 that Gmail users were even given the option to encrypt messages using SSL and to enable it, you had to go into your settings and make a change - something that most mainstream users would never have bothered with. By the end of 2008, Google was only offering SSL as a feature in its other Google Apps programs if users were on either the Premier or Education editions. That meant that for non-paying consumer users, Google Docs, Calendar and other online offerings were only available via unencrypted HTTP sessions.

Today, little has changed. Still, only users of Premier and Education Editions have access to SSL and it's not switched on by default. The protocol is now available for Gmail, Chat, Calendar, Docs and Sites but not the Start page, Google Video or the Google Talk desktop client. Consumers using free Google apps like Docs still don't have SSL unless they type it in the address bar manually.

D'alesandre admitted that switching on encryption in Wave slows down the service a little (which probably explains the company's hesitance to switch it on in other products, too), but they ultimately decided that the security it provides was worth it.

Whitelisting Kills the Noise

A third security feature of sorts coming to Wave in the future is the ability to do "whitelisting." Wave users will be able to select which people they want to collaborate with and place them on a whitelist of approved persons. Only those who are on the list will be able to contact you via Wave and everyone else will be ignored.

That feature should certainly help to address the concerns certain folks have about Wave's "noise level," to some, an overwhelming amount of activity that led them to call out Wave as a distraction and a time-waster instead of the futuristic productivity product it intends to be. By allowing those who can't seem to embrace Wave's cacophony the ability to limit their collaborators, Wave could transfer from noisy attention killer to useful tool in an instant.

Of the three features, the first two are already in place. No date was given on the whitelisting feature, only that it will be "coming soon."

Mark Up Design and Code

Using the app couldn't be much easier. In the visual part of the app, you can add callouts to any part of the page. Once these are saved to Notable's web service, other team members can see these callouts, add their own, or discuss the design in a comments section underneath the screenshot. The code editor, which is somewhat reminiscent of a simpler version of Firebug, also allows you to quickly annotate any part of a website's HTML, CSS, or JavaScript code.

Once a screenshot is saved and uploaded to the site, it can be shared by email, through a private or public URL, and embedded into any other web page. Users can also download a PDF version of the screenshot and annotations. Of course, users can also continue to add more annotations after the screenshot has been uploaded.

While the Firefox plugin represents the easiest and fastest way to use Notable, you can also simply upload any image (a design mock-up, for example) to the service or use a bookmarklet which also works in IE7 and Safari.

iPhone

The iPhone version of Notable is limited to uploading screenshots to Notable, but while it doesn't do much more than that, it makes for a good companion piece to the web service and should come in useful for designers of iPhone apps and mobile websites.

Pricing

The free version of Notable allows users to create one workspace and collaborate with up to three users and store up to 3GB of data. For $24/month, Notable users can work with up to 5 users and create an unlimited number of workspaces. The service also offers accounts for groups with up to 10, 25 or 50 users. The paid accounts also come with additional security features.

Verdict

Like many of the best apps we have recently seen, Notable was developed internally because none of the available apps really fulfilled the requirements the ZURB team had. The service works without any hiccups, is easy to use, and clearly focused on giving a specific set of users the right tools to get the job done without being encumbered by lots of extra bells and whistles.