ReadWriteWeb

EtherPad is not likely to win a price for its user interface design, but it might just be one of the most useful web apps we have seen in quite a while. EtherPad allows you to instantly create a workspace for text documents that you can then share with your colleagues, clients, or friends. Every edit to the document will immediately appear on your co-workers' screens in real-time.

EtherPad acknowledges that Google Docs already allows for a similar kind of collaboration, but compared to EtherPad, Google Docs is clunky and slow when you just want to collaborate on a simple text document.

Given yesterday's cloud computing announcements from Microsoft, it only seems reasonable for Yahoo to make at least some announcements about cloud computing as well. Today, Yahoo announced that it will offer the Zimbra collaboration suite as a hosted solution for educational institutions. According to Yahoo, over 400 schools are already using Zimbra at this time. While this hosted solution is currently only available to educational institutions, chances are that Yahoo is testing the waters with this release and will soon offer a similar solution to small businesses.

Three weeks ago we wrote about the release of the new Application Programming Interface (API) of sophisticated note taking system Evernote. We said we were excited to see what outside developers were going to do with it. Today we saw our first Evernote integration and it is awesome.

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.

The Social Media Classroom (SMC) is a new project started by Howard Rheingold which offers an open-source Drupal-based web service to teachers and students for the purpose of introducing social media into the classroom. The service includes tools like forums, blogs, wikis, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, video conferencing, and more. The SMC is more than just a collection of new media tools repurposed for educational use, though. The end goal of the service is to move education away from being a unidirectional delivery of knowledge to become a more collaborative learning process.

GroupSwim is a company whose SaaS collaboration solution uses semantic technology to automatically tag and rate content including discussions, emails, documents, wikis, and more. As an Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad finalist, the company was honored for making enterprise team collaboration fun to use thanks to features like thumbs up/thumbs down voting and its ability to monitor your favorite topics. Recently, GroupSwim released version 5.0 of their collaboration software which includes even more features like wikis, hidden groups, and new system APIs.

OpenACircle is a new collaboration tool for teams which includes innovative screen-sharing and video conferencing features for instant collaboration with co-workers. This makes OpenACircle somewhat unique in the web-based project/task management space where most competitors have just designed a lightweight version of SharePoint and offer it up as a service. Instead, OpenACircle acknowledges the fact that distributed teams need better tools for collaboration and real-time interaction than just a simple file repository and meeting workspace.

MixMatchMusic is a new music community whose goal is to cater to the long tail of content creators. Although the concept of an online community for musicians is not new - we've covered several here in the past including Imeem, The Filter, and Rifflet - MixMatchMusic is different because it's trying to solve the biggest problem facing the music industry today: helping artists, especially indie artists, get paid for the music they create.

The new surge in Enterprise 2.0 technologies is giving companies, especially small-to-medium sized businesses, more alternatives when it comes to company intranet portals for team collaboration and project management. In fact, it has taken those portals, once only available behind the firewall, and put them online as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. One such SaaS portal for information sharing among company employees launches today at DEMO08: Qtask, a project-centric collaboration environment.

Want to go to fewer meetings at work? By making group decision making faster, easier and more accountable, new app Zapproved may help you avoid hours of painful face to face drudgery or endless email loose ends and get back to work. Zapproved is a lightweight hosted decision making service, it's essentially like Evite for approval processes.

Freshly launched this week, the four person company has a little bit of usability work it could do on its product and the possibilities for additional user interfaces (Blackberry, IM, etc) are many - but the service already looks quite useful.

Sometimes social media users inside big businesses just need to talk about their feelings. More often, they need to share valuable metrics, anecdotes and insights that can help them advance the use of new collaborative tools inside their companies. Where can these conversations go on? Check out ClearStep, a powerful new online community provided by Jive Software.

We were very impressed with Jive's new collaboration service ClearSpace, the technology that powers ClearStep, when it launched in April. Making the feature set there available to the public to discuss the use of social software inside the enterprise is a very good idea.

A company called DreamFactory based in Mountain View, CA has just launched a new Enterprise 2.0 suite of applications called the "DreamTeam Suite." The suite's social element, which consists of online collaboration between team members, gives the suite its "Enterprise 2.0" flair, a term that loosely applies to any business-ready application integrating concepts from the Web 2.0 world. The DreamTeam Suite also joins other business applications in choosing Amazon's cloud infrastructure for their hosting needs, and then passes the money they've saved by doing so back to their customers.

Rifflet is a new site where musicians can gather to finish each other's work. The concept involves the uploading of something called a "rifflet," which is a piece of a song - like a bass line, a guitar riff, a drum beat, or something else altogether. Each rifflet must also be less than 60 seconds long. Members of the site can then browse through these "proto-songs," and combine them with other rifflets they find or even just incorporate them into their own original music.

Earlier this month, we opened up and shared with readers the different ways we're pitched by companies wanting coverage. We mentioned our favorite way (hint: RSS) and have been enjoying the feeds that have been sent in since. We also noted the arrival of the twitpitch - the new trend of pitching via Twitter. Meanwhile, another company had a completely different idea: pitch via mail. Yes, postal mail.

There are a lot of ways to collaborate online - wikis, forums, social networks - but there are very few providers that package all the tools together that a group might need. Grou.ps, a social groupware provider, aims to address that problem by providing its users one single package of integrated tools.

Like a Microsoft Office for social tools, Grou.ps offers the following modules: chat, blog aggregation, wikis, talks (forum + mailing list), photo albums, links (bookmarks and news), calendaring, maps, subgroups, and people (profiles).

Portland, Oregon's Jive Software is launching version 2.0 of its year-old enterprise collaboration suite called Clearspace tonight and it looks like a lot of fun to use.

The service takes on Microsoft's Sharepoint with a feature set that looks like something many consumer software users would be envious of. USAToday recently said that "Jive Software wants to be the Apple Computer of corporate social networks."

If your team is spread out over a wide geographic region, online collaboration tools are key to getting everyone on the same page. Something that dispersed teams haven't had much opportunity to use use are whiteboards, which can be really useful in brainstorming sessions. But now, with Twiddla, this year's winner of the Technical Achievement award at SXSW, comes a team whiteboarding service that offers a no-setup, online meeting web site for team collaboration.

You may recall a previous post we did listing several web-based fiction writing resources...well, here's another one to add to that list: Protagonize. The Protagonize web site is an online creative writing community dedicated solely to collaborative fiction. At Protagonize, one author begins a story, and others post different branches or chapters to it.

After being in development for months, Box.net has
officially released the beta of their new collaboration functionality. With this
new feature, any Box.net user can invite collaborators to any folder in their
account. The collaboration feature is also fully compatible with all the OpenBox
services, which extends online collaboration beyond just word processor
documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, like Google Docs currently offers.

Online media processing tool suite Aviary is opening up two of its many services to those who have requested beta access and a limited number of new requesters. The first two tools, an image editor and a pattern generator, are impressive and will be followed by a vector editor next month and the rest of the Aviary tools later.