Being a veteran of the groupware movement (worked at Lotus for years, and co-founded eRoom Technology) this item caught my eye:
“Liquid Systems, a venture-funded software company that is focused on enterprise messaging and collaboration, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans.” (fromInfoWorld)
I guess only the InfoWorld headline refers to “groupware” but it’s a very 80’s term, that even in the 90’s we at eRoom avoided like the plague.
Dave Winer makes a point which I totally agree with: it is important to learn from what has come before – or more more provocatively – to steal good ideas wherever you can find them. And secondly that the only way to do that is to make it a point of being very familiar with other products, other approaches. As a designer of software I certainly believe in that. In fact,I have lived that over and over again: Improv learned from 1-2-3, eRoom learned from Lotus Notes, etc. And similarly, BlogBridge has...
Here I go again, picking a out quote from a blogger who I really likeand dissecting it. I don’t know, maybe I am cranky. Robert Scoble, of Microsoft and Scobelizer fame, reports on a conversation he had with Kim Polese. All in all a fascinating bit, and I hope Kim realized that Scoble was going to blog the whole dang thing. Buried somewhere in the middle, Scoble says: “It was not possible until there was friction free collaboration (blogs, RSS, Wikis, IRC chat), and a large number of open source components.”
Maybe it’s because I come from the world of collaboration, b...
I was recently asked by a VC friend of mine what I thought of a certain Wiki product. I thought my response to him (with specific product and people references removed) might be interesting. He asked me, “Have you kept track of what’s going on in Wiki-land, and what do you think?” Here’s my answer:
Yes, I have very much kept track of the wiki stuff. After doing eRoom, which is still among the best collab systems out there in my (humble) opinion, I very much believe that there’s a whole next generation of collaboration that is needed. I say this because eRoom and others fall really short when it comes to get mass adoption. Wiki’s might point in that direction.
Email is not dead (Demo 2004 Series – 7) I continue to be an avid follower of what’s going on in the email space. Why? Here are some things to think about:
From my eRoom and Collaboration days, I’ve been very aware of the challenges to achieving adoption. My view is that the challenge exists whenever the adoption of a new application or system requires some degree of coordination between a set of users. Email is by far the greatest example of an application of computers which has very successfully overcome that barrier. I want to learn from that.
Second reason: I’ve observed that the tools we use to work with email (the general striucture email appli...
Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe: “Salas has spent the past few months developing BlogBridge, software that allows users to easily keep tabs on multiple weblogs — kind of a “Reader’s Digest” for the blog world.” Thanks for the mention, Scott. The whole bit is:
** Pito Salas was the chief technology officer at eRoom, an online collaboration company acquired last year by Documentum, which in turn was bought by EMC. Salas has spent the past few months developing BlogBridge*, software that allows users to easily keep tabs on multiple weblogs — kind of a “Reader’s...