WikiOrgCharts CEO Farhan Memon got the idea for the collaborative org chart while he was working at AOL . During his time there, his team had monthly meetings with external partners. Because they lacked insight into the partners’ knowledge and reporting structure, the AOL group struggled to figure out how best to work with the outside team. A colleague drafted an org chart of the other company, and Memon thought, “this org chart is good, but what I’d really like to do is work with colleagues to fill in the blanks and append information to the org chart.” Having a clearer picture of the roles and relationships makes it easier to know where the bottlenecks are, how decisions are made, and how to manage the underlying connections throughout the project, explained Memon.

Building a wikiorgchart is similar to creating an online family tree. (Memon says that they looked at genealogy websites for user interface inspiration.) You drag a person into position and then use linking lines to show the relationship between people. The privacy settings let you shift from the default of identified contributor to anonymous contributor. When members contribute people and relationships to the org charts, they gain the points they need to do their own searches. (The premium membership does not rely on points.) You can start your own profile by linking to your Facebook and LinkedIn pages. This quickly provides information about where you sit in your organization(s), and earns you more points for adding to your profile.

When it comes to getting your resume into the right hands, WikiOrgcharts has some advantages over LinkedIn . Search results on LinkedIn can be limited by a person’s position relative to your existing LinkedIn network and the type of account you have (free versus a variety of paid levels). WikiOrgCharts provides unlimited access to the available information — as long as you have accumulated enough points through participation, or, similar to LinkedIn, have a paid account.

Like Wikipedia, WikiOrgCharts is always growing, but the company has given the site a head start. Said Memon:

We built out the site using a number of different data sources, including social graph information, SEC data, and data from federal government employees. We’ve accumulated 9 million profiles. Our system automates some processes such as bucketing people from different companies, but we’re improving other processes such as sematic matching of companies.

Sensemaking, social intelligence, and the ability to connect are critical skills for modern work. WikiOrgCharts provides a tool to gather the data you need to begin those activities.

Images courtesy of WikiOrgCharts.

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On Windows, GmailDefaultMaker is a handy free lightweight application that will open mailto: links in your preferred webmail client; despite its name it can route email links to Gmail, Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo! Mail.

During the installation, you’re asked to specify which webmail provider you’d like to use. It then runs in the background; any time you click on an email link , it will open the compose screen of your webmail client in your default browser with the To: field filled out. It’s simple but effective, although if you want to switch webmail providers you’ll need to re-install it.

On the Mac, you can use Belkadan Software’s Webmailer, a utility that catches mailto: links and sends them to your preferred webmail client. It’s also a free download, and comes pre-configured for several popular webmail clients, including Yahoo! Mail, AOL, Gmail and Hotmail.

(via Download Squad & Lifehacker)

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• Collaboratively author content, such as proposals and agreements
• Share key documents and files, such as contracts and collateral
• Set meeting agenda, take real-time notes, and capture and assign action items
• Manage critical processes like RFPs with project management tools
• Communicate in real-time with built-in chat, instant messaging and teleconferencing

The new product includes “customer engagement monitoring,” an interesting feature that alerts sales reps or account managers whenever a customer logs in, and also allows a company to see exactly what its customers are viewing or downloading from its workspaces to get a better idea of their interests.

Here’s a (fairly lengthy) “sneak peek” webinar, recorded for existing PBworks customers, that shows off the Customer Relationship edition’s additional features:

PBworks Customer Relationship Edition has a starting price of $30/user/month. Unlimited customer/prospect workspaces and licenses are included at no additional cost. The product will integrate with other CRM tools via its API; a Salesforce.com connector that allows one-click extranet creation from within Salesforce.com, as well as the ability to view those extranets from within Salesforce.com itself, is available at a cost of $1,000 per year.

The Customer Relationship Edition of PBworks joins other special editions of the software tailored for specific verticals, such as project management, the legal profession and education.

Let us know what you think of the new PBworks Customer Realtionship edition in the comments.

Threadsy supports email accounts, including IMAP, Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo, Windows Live/MSN, AOL and MobileMe, as well as Facebook and multiple Twitter accounts. Once authorized (using OAuth or Facebook Connect, so you don’t have to give Threadsy your passwords), updates and messages from these accounts appear in a unified inbox.

When Doriano wrote about it back in December, he noted that it took a while to start up; that issue seems to have been resolved. After login, Threadsy displays an amusing quote or an item from their Twitter feed for a few seconds, then loads Threadsy’s main screen.

In the main screen, you’ll see your inbox on the left, and a social network feed on the right. Threadsy also provides access to Facebook Chat, AIM, MySpace IM, Google Talk and Twitter through the included Meebo Bar. I was concerned that having that much information on one page might lead to overload, but I didn’t find it so.

Threadsy’s email functions work well and searches are fast. You can also view Gmail’s labels/folders. It manages attachments reasonably well, although it doesn’t display PDFs inline the way Apple Mail and Gmail can. You can also print messages, but they include a large Threadsy image in the header.

The compose screen is very slick. Just start typing a recipient’s name, and Threadsy will auto-complete the information if the person is in the address book for any of your accounts. You can specify which of your accounts you want to send the message from, and you can attach files. You can’t actually edit your address book, though.

The social network feed in the sidebar is well laid out, and can be resized. It has some nice touches, like an automatic link expander. When one pulls up a message, the sidebar automatically switches to a timeline showing the sender’s latest updates. This is a useful function that Gist also does well.

Threadsy offers help, but everything is pretty intuitive. The service works very well, although I do have a wish-list of features I’d like to see:

• The ability to control sounds for each account separately, and to change the default sound. I turned off the incoming message sound, since it was chiming very frequently.
• The ability to edit message signatures, as they automatically include links to one’s networks, along with a prominent “sent from Threadsy” message that can’t be eliminated without turning off signatures entirely.
• A”view this message in Gmail” option.
• An option to view full headers and the original message code.
• Growl notifications.

Threadsy does still have some bugs. For some reason, it keeps failing to authorize my Gmail account, even though Google says that Threadsy has access. And it sometimes doesn’t display embedded YouTube videos from friends’ Facebook status updates. Threadsy isn’t quite ready to be my universal inbox yet, but it’s getting close.

Have you tried Threadsy?

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To import email from another account into your Gmail account, just go to the “Settings” link that is on the upper right of your Gmail account, and click it.  Once you’ve done that, hit the “Accounts and Import” tab, as seen in the screenshot above. You can import from Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, or other webmail or POP3 accounts via a wizard. There’s a “Learn More” link if you get confused. Note that you will need to supply the password for your other account.

I went through the import process for an older Hotmail account I have. I haven’t gotten all the messages imported yet, but Google confirms that this is to be expected: “Copying mail over usually takes a couple days, occasionally up to a week — but eventually it all arrives,” says the post announcing the new features. You can also request to have email sent to the other account forwarded to your Gmail account for 30 days.

This was a long time coming from Google, but it will be convenient to not have to hop between email accounts all the time — especially since one of Gmail’s strengths is its huge storage capacity; that should allow me to cut a couple of accounts that I have altogether.

Hit any snags importing an old account into Gmail? Let us know in the comments.

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The increase in bandwidth and pervasive connectivity is putting an end to the passive web. As a result, the nature of information and media is changing. By offering something like Socialthing, AOL is only trying to get ahead of the trend instead of getting pummeled by it. AOL’s in-house publishing unit, MediaGlow, is the first to deploy Socialthing on its 75-odd blogs and many other web sites. “Socialthing turns any media into social media, making it easy for people to share their experiences in real time with their friends, wherever they are on the Web,” said Joanna Shields, president of AOL People Networks. Think of it as a beefier and smarter version of CNN’s experiments with Facebook Connect during the recent election. They are leveraging a user base on their AIM and ICQ platforms of 60 million-plus to give this new effort a jumpstart, but the new platform is quite open and embraces other services as well.

Unified Sign-on — today use your AOL screen name and password and soon you’ll be able to use them for Bebo, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo or OpenID.

Social Syndication — share what you’re reading or talking about with friends on Bebo, AIM, ICQ, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter friends.

On-site Chat and Instant Messaging — for having real-time conversations with others around the same topics.

The Lifestream Platform — a real-time, open platform for aggregating and distributing social feeds across different networks, including Bebo, AIM, ICQ, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter. Socialthing-enabled sites can send updates to other Socialthing sites from mobile devices such as the iPhone and through the AIM and ICQ desktop clients.

The AIM & ICQ Messaging Platform — adds chat and Instant Messaging directly to Socialthing-enabled web sites. That means people can easily alert AIM and ICQ buddies to breaking news and interesting stories from across the web.

The AOL Open Authentication API (OpenAuth) — enables third-party web sites and applications to authenticate AOL and AIM users through their web sites and applications. OpenAuth will be extended to include support for single sign-on from Facebook, Google, Yahoo, OpenID and many other services.

So what do I make of this news? It’s a well-thought out approach to the increasingly social web. My only problem with AOL is the same one I have with Nokia: Despite the vision, they fail to deliver. I hope AOL proves me wrong.

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Regardless, there must be a good number of such users, to encourage AOL to develop a plugin that enables their users to collect mail from Yahoo!’s email service, a plugin which launched late last week.

Inline with AOL’s recent strategy at the AOL.com home page to embrace and integrate third party content and services within their own properties, Yahoo’s messaging behemoth is now available – albeit as message previews only – within the AOL Mail interface. Users can then click through to their corresponding message at the Yahoo! service.

It’s all kinda, um, underwhelming and the kind of feature that should have been there all along; an indictment of the ‘data prison’ strategies employed by web’s largest properties.

Data portability is a subject I’ve written about many times here at Web Worker Daily, notably with regard to the portability of email data trapped within services such as Hotmail, Google Apps and Outlook…though fortunately (as these links illustrate) each of those services has a third-party ‘jailbreaking option’ to liberate your data.

With much of our personal and professional data now residing ‘in the cloud’ and on remote services, it’s ever more important to press for the ability to export and import data from any service – and insist on the use of standards where possible. I’m sure that the product manager for AOL Mail has come across the IMAP and POP email protocols. Perhaps offering such capabilities by default can weaken the retention of a customer, but its possible to mitigate this by offering data portability or export as a premium option and actually competing on design and features, rather than crippling a service.

Services such as Dopplr and del.icio.us have long had export features baked in – making this central to a service’s design philosophy illustrates a respect and value for the user that is likely to ensure a degree of loyalty.

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After 30th June, Microsoft’s Windows Live Mail application will be the only means by which desktop and offline access to Hotmail accounts will be supported. This effectively means that a Hotmail user’s messages continue to be imprisoned within a closed ecosphere of services and applications. OK, smart people won’t be using Outlook, Outlook Express or Hotmail, but millions do and many have years of messages archived that they may wish to continue accessing outside a web-based interface.

However, there are some unofficial mechanisms that can not only continue to provide offline and desktop access, but also standards-based access into most email clients

• IzyMail has close to a decade of experience in delivering webmail gateway services. A one-off payment of $17.95 buys a one-year subscription that equips any Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL and Gmail account with a POP and IMAP ‘wrapper’, so users can send, receive and synchronise messages using most desktop clients, such as Thunderbird, Apple Mail and Outlook

• Thunderbird’s WebMail extension plays a similar role to IzyMail, though is of course limited only to Thunderbird and doesn’t necessarily support the various permutations of a service like Hotmail (Live Hotmail, Hotmail Classic etc.) but does support a wider range of services

• Apple Mail fans can use a similar plugin – HTTP Mail – to retrieve Hotmail messages and folder.

Of these solutions, I’d recommend IzyMail’s standards-based approach, freeing the user to employ any both leading mail protocols with the widest range of clients. Indeed, IzyMail saw a huge spike in subscriptions with the launch of the iPhone last Summer as users utilised POP and IMAP webmail gateways to synchronise their email with their phones.

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