One of the latest sprouts to emerge from the box is Squad, Trotzke's gift to developers everywhere - and we mean everywhere! This web-based environment allows distributed teams to collaborate in real time, opening, editing and sharing code from anywhere with an Internet connection.

And because it's collaborative, it's great for conducting code reviews or paired programming. And it's a perfect platform for noobs and the poor suckers who have to train them. It's even got a built in chat module so you can discuss changes as they're made.

Parts of this app dimly reminded us of Lowdown, a plain-text collaboration tool for developers to communicate to designers and managers, and even more so of How's My Code, a resource for distributed teams to conduct code reviews and keep all the coders for a project on the same page. But those apps were relatively lightweight contraptions slapped together for the Rails Rumble a couple months ago. Trotzke offers a product of a different caliber altogether.

He wrote to us, "It has a unique approach to realtime interaction that even non-developer types would find interest in.

"Users follow each others actions (tab switching, scrolling, etc.) and then see each character they type. You kind of need to try it out to get the feel, but it's pretty sexy for instructional or code review use cases."

Sounds sexy indeed! Like a developers-only, less-crowded, actually useful version of Google Wave.

Check out the screenshots:

Pricing is competitive and ranges from free to $40 per month for teams of up to 5 users, with additional user support available for $7 per user per month. And the first month is free for everyone on a trial basis.

Squad supports a variety of languages, including HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Python, SPARQL, Lua and XML. Squad works great as an HTML editor, a PHP editor or a plain text editor.

The startup also plans to add a Ruby syntax mode, enhanced search and replace functions; an offline sharing mode; a show/hide feature on the collaboration panel; and project handling functions.

It looks like a great, exciting product, and we look forward to reading users' reviews and seeing what else Trotzke and the Squad team come up with.

One feature the team purposely left out of the editor for now is an in-page chat. Given how many users already us IM or IRC already, this wasn't a priority for the team, though this might come in a later version.

Try It

If you want to give Bespin's collaboration a quick spin, here are some instructions courtesy of Bespin developer Joe Walker:

• Sign up or login to Bespin.
• Press CTRL+J/CMD+J to open the command line.
• Type 'follow joewalker' to get someone to share files with. Joe shared a project called pubproj globally.
• Type 'project list'. You should see joewalker+pubproj in your list of projects.
  Type 'set collaborate on' to turn on shared editing.
• Open a shared file by typing 'open /joewalker+pubproj/example.txt'.
• You should then be in a collaborative editing session with the rest of the Internet.
• Click on the collaboration icon (2 people) in the top right hand corner to show you who's editing with you.

For more details about Bespin itself, have a look at our earlier coverage.

According to stories on Nextgov and Federal Computer Week, the GSA had a number of other legal concerns about the standard terms and conditions of these services, including problems with indemnification clauses, liability limits, and endorsements, which led it to enter negotiations with these services. Also, a lot of the standard agreements call for dispute resolutions by state courts, while for government agencies, federal law has to apply.

It is important to note that these new agreements only cover the free services offered by these companies. The GSA is also looking into expanding these agreements to a wider range of social media services.

A number of federal agencies, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Library of Congress already use services like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr. To do so, however, these agencies either needed special waivers, or they negotiated terms directly with these services. Some of these initiatives have been very successful. Pictures from the Library of Congress, for example, have been viewed over 15 million times.

Library of Congress on iTunes

In addition, the Library of Congress today announced that it will begin to share more of its content on YouTube and, as podcasts, through Apple's iTunes. This initiative will launch in the next few weeks.

Engaging the Public

We are glad to see that the GSA has now removed some of the major stumbling blocks that stopped a large number of government agencies from using social media sites. Now we just hope that these agencies will also use these services to actually engage with citizens.

Called Portable Contacts, the technical spec offers a standard, interoperable way for social networks to serve up your friends lists to anyone you give permission to access them. This should allow application developers to innovate on top of your social connections much more efficiently.

we're seeing major Internet companies making contacts APIs available, such as Google's GData Contacts API, Yahoo's Address Book API, and Microsoft's Live Contacts API (with more to come). Not surprisingly though, each of these APIs is unique and proprietary. We believe this creates the ideal conditions for developing a common, open spec that everyone can benefit from.

Why is This Important?

The social web works best when it's truly social. New applications that use social sharing can be much more useful when new users can port in their existing network of friends and see who they know is already using a site. That's much better than starting cold.

These types of standardized approaches to passing that data are secure (that's good) and allow developers to write code once to use all the supporting sources of data. You've heard the old illustration about railroads? When all the railroads in the US accepted a standard size of rail, all the trains were able to travel much farther than ever before. That's where we're headed with all this information on the web. When we give it standard methods of transport, it can go further and do more than ever before.

That's a pretty big deal and it's fantastic that Google has moved to support the Portable Contacts standard. Hopefully sometime soon everyone will and then we'll wonder what took the web so long to enable social interoperability.

This is a great idea and we expect that young people who discover it will appreciate it. At first glance it looks better to us than iTunes University. This could genuinely help young people make more informed decisions about what schools to apply to. There's also a lot of great content on the site for anyone to learn from.

Last year we asked "Is YouTube the Next Google?," noting that video search is one of the most compelling types of search online. There is video content online, and on YouTube in particular, about just about anything. College content? That's a no brainer.

If you like academic videos, make sure to check out Academic Earth as well.

The highly anticipated general release of StackOverflow, the social site for programming questions developed by rock star programmers Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, hasn't happened yet - but the doors are cracked open and many new users are streaming in this morning.

The Big Idea

The idea behind StackOverflow is to offer a really well designed site where programmers can find answers to questions that are more obscure than they can get answered elsewhere. Site founders Spolsky and Attwood are software gurus focused on developer relations and user experience. They've got a very capable team with them as well, as is evidenced by the product so far.

The community is for developers working in any programming language and use of the site is completely free. The name StackOverflow refers to an infinite loop or recursion in the programming languages C or C++ and sure enough, a lot of the conversation on the site is self referential so far. The team's got plans for that, though, so we're confident this will be less the case than it is on other sites.

So far, we like it a lot. What does it look like? Check out these screen shots.

Screen Shots

The front page.

My Question Got Answered!

I got a good answer to an admittedly simple question, in 2 minutes. Awesome.

Asking a Question.

Pretty smart UI here, quite helpful and fun to use.

A User Profile

Above, the top half of a user profile, below the bottom half. Note that you can see how often a user votes things up or down but you cannot see specific voting history. The user feed is nice.

Our Thoughts

The UI here has lots of really nice little touches, it's responsive, communicative and relatively clear. We like it a lot and that was one of the site's big goals, to build an effective UI.

Account creation looks very good, it happens automatically via cookie until you register, but OpenID association with your account is not implemented particularly well. Attwood is blaming OpenID providers for that on Twitter, but we're seeing a few too many problems to buy that.

There's already an active community of beta testers on the site and they've developed extensions like a Firefox and IE7 search plugin, a couple of Greasemonkey scripts and a Ubiquity script. That's pretty awesome.

There's a sophisticated credibility system at work here, where users who build up their reputation are given new capabilities. Those capabilities include commenting on questions instead of just answering them and doing some moderation.

The "community mode" is interesting, things are wiki style on the site and once a certain number of edits have occurred the original asker of the question no longer owns it - it becomes a community question, with lower credibility thresh holds required for interaction, etc. The Community User username is tied to these threads and acts as an automated bot repairing things like malformed tags through out the site. That sounds really helpful.

Finally on the positive side, we got some good replies to our questions really quickly and we're already having a lot of fun just browsing the site.

The Down Sides

We like StackOverflow a lot so far, but there are some real concerns that deserve to be raised. As the site's owners have voiced throughout its development, the quality of discussions may go down rapidly when they open up to the world at large. We hope that's not the case but we will watch the reputation and bios of the people who answer our questions.

More importantly, perhaps, we're not sure the Digg-style home page is the best way to organize these discussion. Is it on the basis of the newness or hotness of questions that things should be ranked? Or should top answers be highlighted? We know that the site's developers have spent a lot of time wrestling with these questions, so we won't pretend to know better, but we hope the core prioritization principles work out well in this context.

There are some features that we expected to see here but don't. An easy way to mark a thread for reading later would be really helpful, as would a feed for those items in our account. A feed for answers given to our questions would be nice. So would the option to get an email notification when one of our questions is replied to, or another question we're interested in. GetSatisfaction's "I'm interested in this too" feature would make a world of sense - let me know when someone else gets an answer to this question because I'm curious. Finally, a "thanks for this" button like Ma.gonlia would make sense and offer a different kind of feedback.

We've already subscribed to the feeds for several topic tags and we're excited about everything we expect we can learn from the StackOverflow community. General availability of the site is expected sometime this week or next.