The organizers approached me to develop a web site to aggregate these posts in real-time before, during and after the event. In the process, I learned how such a site can reinforce the development of community.

I’m sure that you’ve been to events where good ideas are hatched and projects are planned, but often, despite the best of intentions, activity loses steam after the event is over, and nothing much gets done. It’s too early yet to judge the long-term effectiveness of this particular event, but I’m optimistic that it will make more of a difference than many such gatherings.

The electronic component of the event was relatively simple. We created a content-managed web site that would act as the hub for the many places that participants would post their contributions and reflections. We didn’t require participants to use a specific CMS tool (although they were welcome to use ours). Instead, before, during and after the conference, participants were encouraged to use existing technologies with which they were familiar to document their thoughts, and we then created links to their contributions.

Before the Event

The web site went live a couple of weeks before the event began. By that time, event announcements and registration had already been posted to a section on the sponsoring organization’s web site. Participants had been asked to interview another attendee as a “get-to-know-you” exercise. The results were to have been posted, but very few did so — I suspect because the CMS used by the sponsoring organization has a significant learning curve.

In the future, I would recommend creating the event-specific web site much sooner, and using a simpler CMS-, group-blog, social-network or wiki-based system for posting pre-event discussions and comments.

During the Event

The venue at our local university had limited wired connectivity, but it was sufficient for a video stream, an audio stream, and the web updates that I was doing. The video stream worked fine; the audio stream was less successful because the university had blocked the ports we needed. For the same reason, we had to use a MiFi connection to use FTP. Thankfully, this did not affect access to our CMS.

Participants were able to connect using Wi-Fi, which worked well, aside from some issues with entering passwords. I’m guessing that perhaps fifty people were connected at any one time.

The event web site included the following, all of which was updated frequently:

• An attendee list, with links to participants’ web sites and Twitter feeds.
• The event agenda. Since the event was an “un-conference” using the “open space” approach, much of the agenda was developed on the spot by attendees.
• A Twitter statuses JavaScript badge showing posts from the event. These tweets were mostly done by me on behalf of event organizers, but other committee members also tweeted through the conference account.
• A Twitter search widget showing a real-time feed of all posts using the conference hashtag. A full-screen version of this widget was projected in the room where most discussions took place, and it proved very popular.
• A link to a Twapperkeeper archive of the Twitter hashtag feed.
• A Facebook fan box linking to the event’s Facebook page.
• A Flickr badge and links to tagged photos and videos. Flipcharts and graphs were scanned or photographed, then posted to Flickr and to the web site as JPGs and PDFs. We also put up a Picasa link at the request of attendees, but it didn’t get used.
• A Ustream video feed. Video of many sessions was fed live into the site, then archived.
• A link to YouTube search results tagged with the event’s tag.
• An audio feed. Podcasts of many sessions were made available later.
• Links to blogs of those attendees who were writing about the event.
• A wiki for allowing attendees to post notes from event sessions. We chose to use a wiki rather than giving all users access to the CMS, although I think that in future we might go the other way, as some found editing the wiki difficult.
• An RSS feed for tracking changes to all of the above.

After the Event

We had not created a LinkedIn group before the event. However, participants indicated that they wanted to have an electronic venue for continuing the discussion after the conference. We surveyed the room, and discovered that almost everyone was already a LinkedIn user. Since LinkedIn groups and subgroups can be created immediately, we chose to use that service. We could have selected another group conversation service, though, and participants may move to more sophisticated collaborative tools as their discussions continue.

Planning and Setup

If you are ever called upon to provide this sort of support to an event, it can be fun and educational. Here are some tips to make things go smoothly.

• Get involved with the planning committee as soon as possible, and get an event-specific web site posted early.
• Agree on the hashtag for the event, and publicize it.
• Coordinate with the meeting venue to make sure that it has adequate power and bandwidth (both wired and Wi-Fi), and that it does not block ports.
• Plan to bring your own equipment if possible, or make sure that you have everything you’ll need.
• Set up a “tech table” in a convenient location.
• Have a group of volunteers who can cover the full event.
• Give yourself lots of time for setup and breakdown.
• Have a dedicated laptop and projector for displaying the Twitter hashtag feed — participants will love it.
• Consider what you’ll need in the way of cameras, scanners and printers. We had them all, and they were handy to have, but we could probably have done without them.

I found that attendees’ blogging, tweeting, recording and instant posting about the event reinforced what they were thinking and learning. Thus, the effectiveness of the event was increased, along with the potential for new learning and insights to cause change in the wider world.

How do you use social media and the web for events?

Images by Flickr users Choconancy1 and hajush

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I have always wanted to post my Twitter photos to an existing, richer photo sharing site: Flickr. Recently, I’ve been trying out Steven Haddox‘s Flickr4Twitter, a service that does just that — and should be useful for budding photojournalists, nano-bloggers and celebrity spotters with

Currently in a public alpha-testing phase, the service allows Twitter clients to simultaneously post photos to a user’s Twitterstream and Flickr account, along with URLs generated by Flickr’s own recently-launched Short URLs service.

Using the service is simple:

1. Create an account using the Sign In With Twitter option; your username will be your Twitter screenname.
2. Authorize Flickr to use the service.
3. Upload your photos using the web upload interface (kinda clunky) or Tweetie. Users of Tweetie 2 on iPhone can configure their client with a “URL Shortening API Endpoint” that sends photos to Flickr rather than Twitpic.
4. That’s it!

The service works invisibly and seamlessly when using Tweetie 2 (see my samples) and means that my mobile photos are instantly shared with my Twitter followers, and are also available on the world’s favorite photo sharing service.

Head on over to Flickr4Twitter to try the service. Incidentally GDZLLA have also launched a competing service, but without Sign In With Twitter capability.

What do you think of this Twitpic alternative?

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Fortunately, there are ways to automate the process of cross-posting photos to many different services at one time.

Flickr

One of the best ways to broadcast your photos is via Flickr. It’s very simple to set up, and the results will save you a great deal of time. You’ll be able to send any photo from your mobile device to your Flickr account via email, and it will then automatically send a link to that photo on Twitter and Facebook at the same time, if you choose to do so. To set up Flickr to automatically share photos with your contacts on Facebook and Twitter:

1. Login to Flickr
2. Go to your account settings: http://www.flickr.com/account
3. Click Extending Flickr
4. Next to “Your Facebook account” click the “Link Your Accounts” link, which will allow you to connect your Flickr and Facebook accounts. This doesn’t mean photos will be stored in your Facebook Photo albums; it’ll just post a message in your friends’ newsfeeds with a link to the photo in your Flickr account.
5. Now connect Flickr to Twitter by going here.

6. Click the “Go to Twitter to Authorize” button which will display the following screen that will allow you to connect both of your accounts.

After this step, you will also be able to post links to any Flickr photo to your Twitterstream via the “Blog This” option on your photos on Flickr.

That’s all there is to it. As easy as 1 (Flickr), 2 (Twitter), 3 (Facebook)!

Posterous

Posterous allows you to accomplish the same thing, and more. Not only can you automatically share a photo on Flickr, Twitter and Facebook with a single upload, but you can also post it to other services such as Tumblr, Picasa and popular blogging platforms. Another useful feature is the ability to pick and choose which services you want to post your photo to, just by using unique email addresses. Here are some of the most popular ones:

• twitter@posterous.com
• flickr@posterous.com
• facebook@posterous.com
• tumblr@posterous.com
• blog@posterous.com (for any blog)

If you use post@posterous.com then the photo will go to all of the accounts you’ve set up in your Posterous account. You can also create combination emails to send the photo to any combination of services you want, such as flickr+twitter@posterous.com or twitter+facebook@posterous.com and so on.

Parting Shot

Whether for work or play, connecting your online services will save you a lot of time. It can very easily become point, click and share everywhere online.

What services do you use for sending photos to multiple social networks?

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How much are you willing to pay for your favorite web apps and services? That’s the key question to which every app developer wants an answer. It seems as if the provider of every once-free service is now pondering ways to make money and extract revenue from their members, which makes sense when you consider that they are, after all, businesses.

Remember that old adage, you get what you pay for? Will we continue to see more of our favorite free services following this model of offering stripped down freemium accounts along with feature-rich premium plans? Will online advertising ever allow these sites to generate enough revenue to avoid going this route?

Proven Winners

Here are a couple of services that have found the right formula for success when it comes to charging their members. There might be some valuable lessons learned by examining these successful services to see how they managed to get their users to take out their wallets rather than their pitchforks and torches.

Flickr was one of the first sites to capitalize on the fact that its members needed its services. They knew that people love their photos and they would be more than willing to pay a small fee for the convenience of storing and sharing their precious collections online. The paid accounts offered a few other bells and whistles, too, which only made the decision to pay easier.

Evernote is another service that was clever enough to jump on a need it knew its members would pay for — storing notes and information in the cloud, and then having them accessible via the web from their desktop and mobile devices.

When the iPhone was released with its feeble notes app, Evernote swooped in with its own much more fully featured app, which allowed even more users to tap into their service, and thus into their wallets.

Contenders or Pretenders

Here are a few services that show promise as they venture into paid subscription territory from the freemium universe. They originally hooked their users with totally free service, and only later announced their membership plans. Time will tell if they made the right move.

Jott emerged on the scene with an ambitious service that allowed its members to save their audio notes to the web via their mobile device. It also cross-posted to other services such as Twitter, Facebook and Remember the Milk. For the longest time it was free and in beta, then it announced its premium plans. There’s still a free plan but it’s extremely limited. Many members opted out, but many of them stuck around for one of the new paid plans.

Box also enticed members with free online storage but then later added premium plans with greater features such as larger file size for uploads (25 MB vs 1 GB, for example) and much more storage space (1 GB for free accounts vs. 30 GB for Business accounts).

While there are a slew of online storage services comparable to box.net (including some free ones with much larger storage), Box has wisely continued to innovate and has released many new features and options to make its service stand out. For example, its ability to work with your desktop applications as well as mobile devices is very handy. It has also released its own online apps to create documents and save them directly to your account.

Dropbox is another online storage service. It’s similar to Box but it does things a little differently. It provides the ability to automatically synchronize your files from multiple computers and provides twice the space of box.net for free accounts (2 GB). It also has premium accounts for far greater amounts of data.

Services That Will Start Charging Someday

Hulu is extremely popular these days. It remains free, but look for it to trot out some premium services soon. The companies behind it, NBC and ABC/Disney, are no slouches when it comes to making a buck, so hold on to your wallets. Clear signs of its financial plans is the way it has thwarted boxee’s attempts to share its content with its user base. The message is “No pay, no play”.

Yes, even the red-hot popular media darling Twitter has been struggling with the subject matter of monetization. Its difficulties with discovering a way to make money have been analyzed to death by countless financial experts and business gurus. It has looked at charging users for premium services, implementing advertisements and charging third party services for access to its API. Ultimately, no one knows how Twitter will cash in on all of its recent media coverage. No matter what it does, they will become the perfect case study in courses for future web entrepreneurs.

Final Thoughts

Ultimately, most sites will fail if they aren’t careful when it comes to charging for their services. Recession or not, there are only so many services anyone can pay for, no matter how slick the interface or how many bells and whistles they offer. However, they also need to conduct themselves as a business and find a way to pay the bills.  At the end of the day, it’s always going to come down to a question quality of service and quantity of need.

Do you use mostly free services, or mostly pay? What factors help convince you that a service is in fact worth paying for?

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Last week, for example, Simon covered the release of skimmer, a desktop client that brings together notifications from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other services. Also recently launched is Cosmic Machine’s EventBox, a Mac-only application that similarly mashes together notifications and messages from a range of web services: Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Flickr and Reddit, as well as the capability to import raw RSS feeds.

Both skimmer and EventBox are pretty and pull a variety of web services into a single stream of information. But as a heavy user of multiple social networks and web apps, neither provides me with any real ability to manage the stream of information I get from all those web services. As far as I can tell, all they really do is to move noise from several separate sources into a single cacophony of content. There are some limited filters to fish out particular keywords from the stream, but nothing that I couldn’t use an RSS reader -– like Google Reader -– to replicate.

So here’s what I’d love to see from lifestreaming tools:

• De-duplication – When friends post the same update to Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn, I only get one update.
• Social volume control – Over time, lifestreaming apps should understand the content sources and people to which I pay most attention. I should be able to crank up the volume to show me everything, or dial it down to just the people and sources I really want to know about.
• Relevance – A simple text filter is a no-brainer, but how about a relevance filter, looking at what my connections are reading as a collaborative filter for my own content sources?
• Explore the “long tail” – I want my app to signal to me what’s mainstream and what’s niche, to allow me to drill down to esoteric opinions while at the same time getting a broader picture of what’s happening.
• Visualization – The app should let me see at a glance what’s happening in my sphere of connections and content. Let interesting conversations and contents bubble up to the surface so I only need to be distracted by things of importance.

So, what do you want to see in your lifestreaming toolbox?

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skimmer is a cross-platform desktop client, built using Adobe AIR, that gives you a single interface to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Youtube and Blogger. Even in beta it works pretty well, and has some nice touches, such as displaying Twitpic images inline so you don’t have to open another browser tab. Think of it as a Tweetdeck-like app that also allows you to keep an eye on what’s happening with your friends on Flickr, Youtube and Blogger. You can also use it to upload photos and video. It is a very elegantly designed application that looks great.

If I wanted a full-screen Twitter/lifestreaming client I would probably consider using skimmer, but it’s a bit too heavyweight for me. I prefer having a small, unobtrusive twhirl window at the side of my screen to keep up-to-date with what’s happening on Twitter. While you can set skimmer up in a “widget”-size window, it still takes quite a lot of screen real estate; it’s probably best to run skimmer on a second screen.

I’d also caution that the app takes a lot of memory to run (a common problem with AIR applications). skimmer is currently using nearly 200MB of memory on my machine – hopefully this is something that will be addressed in a future version.

Have you tried skimmer? What did you think?

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One of the best things about this little application is it gets you out of Flickr’s often busy and slow photo uploading process.

jUploadr lets you drag photo files into a central space to get them ready for uploading to Flickr. You can edit properties for the photos, invert them, and work on batches of photos concurrently, with much more flexibililty than Flickr provides. You can also store them in named sets.

Often, when using Flickr’s upload process, I’ve done time-consuming photo resizing tasks in an image editor first, especially when I’m working with small images for blog posts. jUploadr is a time-saver here, though. You can set limits on maximum photo size, so that, for example, 1280 pixels on one side might be the maximum you allow.

The utility of this type of application depends on how often you use Flickr, and whether you work with large sets of photos. I happen to use Flickr every day, so jUploadr will be a keeper.

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As AltSearchEngines points out, the problem with searching for huge sets of photos from Google or Yahoo is that the results aren’t sortable in flexible ways (Google just sorts by image size), and you get no information about rights and copyrights beyond the standard warning that copyrights may apply. That’s where CompFight shines.

CompFight adds much flexibility to the Flickr image search process. To the left of its search bar, you can choose to search only by tags for very targeted searches, or toggle for an All Text search. If you’re looking for images that you can reproduce without worrying about copyright issues, you can also use CompFight to restrict your searches to photos that fall under the Creative Commons license. And, you can toggle to a Commercial setting for commercially usable photos. Creative Commons has several licenses, including one that specifies intent for commercial publication of photos. You can review the terms of all the licenses here.

CompFight has a number of other useful settings. Many people, especially those who have worked in the publishing industry for a long time, know that photographers can get very territorial about their work. Just as it can be easy to deploy an open source application in defiance of the underlying license for the application, it can also be easy to tread on rights that pertain to photos. If you use Flickr a lot to find images you want to publish online, CompFight can help you use images as photographers intended them to be used.

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Apple MacBook

I’ve been asked to live blog an event for a client and their members. Actually, I’ll be live blogging, podcasting, Twittering, Uttering, and live streaming an event.

I am putting together my equipment, securing accounts with all the online tools and services I need, and reviewing the schedule so I’m prepared. This will be a major undertaking that will include two 12 hour days as well as pre- and post-blogging.

Normally, live blogging a conference is done with a team, but this is a proof-of-concept so I’m on my own.

While I’ve live blogged and live tweeted conferences before, this is the first time I’ll be doing it formally for a client. The conference is not my usual fare – it is about philanthropy instead of Internet or technology. I’ve worked with many nonprofits over the last 15 years – including running a nonprofit in New York City in the mid-90s – so the issues aren’t foreign to me. Still, I’ll have to be on top of my game – with a healthy dose of caffeine – to keep up.

Here’s what I’ve put together so far for my Live Blogging Gear.

Keen Oswago Bag

The Bag
I almost attempted to make a bag that could handle my MacBook, assorted digital devices and a variety of accessories and that would keep everything at my hip, fairly ergonomically balanced, and extremely accessible. Luckily, I found something close to what I needed at REI. The Oswago Keen bag sits neatly on my hip, and I can quickly access my MacBook, a notebook and pen, my digital camera, my video camera, my iPod Touch, extra batteries, and all of my power cords and accessories.

The Computer
Black MacBook. Perfect size, weight, capabilities, sleek and good looking. Why use anything else?

The Digital Camera
I’m using a Nikon Coolpix L5 – 7.2 Megapixels, 5x Zoom. An older model but still going strong. I’m still on the fence about upgrading to a slimmer, lighter model. I’ve been using a variety of Nikon Coolpix for many years after graduating from an old digital Olympus. Any recommendations? Keep in mind I am not a professional photographer, and these photos are mostly for the Web.

Flip Mino

The Video Camera
I’ve got The Flip and love its self-contained utility. I’m upgrading from the original model to either an Ultra or a Mino. I should go for the Mino because in addition to the sleekness, it is rechargeable via USB port as well as power adapter. I’m planning to try live video streaming from Flip to Web.

The Digital Recorder
While I’d love to get the Marantz 660 because I also do radio (you remember radio, right?) in addition to audio podcasting, I’ve decided to be a little more frugal at the moment and get the Edirol / Roland R-09HR Portable High-Resolution Audio Recorder. Both were recommended to me by radio producers, although the latter choice was focused more on podcasting so that definitely works for the live blogging. I’ll be interviewing panelists and speakers before or after their sessions.

The Blog
At the moment, the client is setting up the blog. I’ll be consulting to make sure it is “social media ready.”

Ustream.tv

Ustream.tv
I’m planning on using Ustream.tv to live stream parts of the conference. I’m still checking with the client about whether to keep all of this private (for their members only) or public.

Utterz
In a pinch, I’ll post some Utterz when I don’t want to mess with the digital recorder and want to have some audio up on the organization’s blog quickly.

Flickr
There will be a private collection of photos uploaded each day from the event on Flickr. These will also be posted on the blog along with additional cross-posting.

Twitter
But of course I’ll do a little live Twittering on Twitter. It will be private though, only accessible by my client’s members.

Other Miscellany
I’m packing all the powercords and chargers including a slew of rechargeable batteries and a multi-battery recharger. Rule of live blogging: Never run out of power. And of course I am packing a notebook and pens to give my wrists a break. I’m pretty sure there is no way I can type notes on that many sessions without some repetitive stress injury.

As I look over my list, I wonder about overkill. However, even though there is some crossover of functionality, every device can serve a backup function in one way or another so I feel like I’m covered for everything.

What am I forgetting? What do YOU use when you live blog an event?

[photos from Apple.com, REI.com, TheFlip.com, Ustream.tv]

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Nine years ago as an interactive designer in a multimedia agency, designers would post various items we liked -magazine clippings, flyers, business cards, websites – onto a physical noticeboard that we could glance up at for inspiration. Over time, this grew organically into a wonderful design resource for the studio.

These days, my equivalent is a folder on my MacBook desktop called ‘Design Bin’ – I screenshot or scan a design I think might be inspirational in future and dump it in my design bin. However simple, this resource is growing in volume but diminishing in context – and in a connected era – is strangely unsociable.

Enter Scrnshots, a web-based service that lets designers share their inspirations by posting screenshots of interesting designs to a Flickr-esque web site.

There’s nothing here that cannot be accomplished by use and adaptation of photo and image sharing services like Flickr. But the emphasis on graphic designers and the materials that inspire them ensure a focus that could become otherwise diffused in a broader-based service. For web workers, the ability to be inspired by the inspirations of others is a powerful feature.

Scrnshots is the first production of Vancouver’s Orange Peel Media. Last Saturday, after playing about with the service for a few hours, I got the chance to pose some questions to cofounders Greg Bell and Derek Kehler…

Do you see services like Flickr missing a huge niche? Can you sneak under the radar and take users/usage from such apps by producing interesting verticals.

Yes. We do see services like Flickr missing a huge niche, but it’s not their fault. It’s not what they set out to accomplish. Derek and I are both avid Flickr users and love it for sharing our photos, but, we don’t want to share our screenshots with our friends and family (our Flickr contacts). They just get annoyed with us. They’re interested in seeing photos of our dogs, not screenshots of the greatest form designs we ever saw.

On the other hand, we all have huge collections of screenshots that are collecting dust on our harddrives and could be a great source of inspiration and conversation for the web community. That’s why we built Scrnshots. It’s a personal itch that we wanted to scratch.

Current design galleries are very one way. There is a group of people who get to decide what screenshots are added to them and then users are not even given tools to discuss the work. We wanted to change the game completely and give everyone the ability to create their own design gallery and share it with the world. We’ve found it extremely refreshing to subscribe to our friends’ RSS feeds on ScrnShots and see what they are posting on a regular basis. It makes for a type of conversation that wasn’t necessarily possible before.

Other than designers, can you see other communities that might find the service useful?

The primary target audience for ScrnShots is the web design community. We do however recognize that the tools we’re building have value to other communities such as blogger, gamers, etc. Really, the community is being built to allow for easy posting and discussion of screenshots. We aren’t too concerned whether they are designers or not.

We don’t claim to have all the answers for where ScrnShots is heading, rather we want to get it out into the public, start building a community and then see where it takes us.

The desktop app looks useful – will you have the capability to grab entire pages in a browser – a la Paparazzi?

Thanks! We’ve been using the app internally for a while and it makes the service so much easier/better to interact with. It becomes second nature to add screenshots to your account. At launch, the app won’t support taking full page screenshots like in Paparazzi. But, we are releasing at the same time a public API which we hope to see some simple tools built for that we just don’t have time to do. Also, we are working on getting a Firefox plugin made which would be able to take full page grabs.

Is the tech scene in Vancouver favorable to entrepreneurs and startups?

The Vancouver tech scene is “growing.” There are quite a few new opportunities that have emerged within the last few months: Bootup Labs and Launch Party being the two that we have been in contact with.

I know for a fact that there are lots of new startups arising from the Vancouver area, however, I’m not too sure whether they’ve had a lot of help getting there. I think the entrepreneurial way of doing things is to just work as hard as you can by yourself; if someone helps out along the way, that’s just a bonus.

Are you thinking about import tools – like grab all my images tagged ‘screenshot’ from Flickr?

This is the reason we’re releasing the public API. We see so many other services on the web that ScrnShots could integrate with as well as all the different desktop screen-capture applications. While we don’t have a formal plan to build the Flickr importer yet, it really would not be that much work once our API is finished.

Can you see some deeper integration with design tools like Photoshop, maybe creating mood boards or an ‘inspire me’ tool?

We are definitely working towards getting deeper integration into the Designer’s workflow. Design shops have expressed interest in creating private areas for their teams to brainstorm and share screenshots with clients to replace traditional mood-boarding techniques. We’ve used ScrnShots to do this and found that is was extremely successful. We are releasing PRO (paid) accounts on June 6 which will include the ability to create private screenshots as well as private groups. So, a design studio could create a private group for a project, then collect screenshots of all the client’s competitors as well as design inspiration for the project. Currently, there are very few tools that let studios do this in a useful way.

Currently invitation-only, Scrnshots launches to the general public today.

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Open Data philosophies have begun to coalesce around essays such as the speculative Data Bill Of Rights and the emerging Data Portability movement, web-based services that support portability are still quite rare and invariably the exception to the rule.

Services such as Flickr, del.icio.us and Gmail do allow data extraction of sorts; indeed Gmail’s support for IMAP was apparently motivated by the desire for data portability and enabling users freely import and export messages. Conversely, Microsoft announced that it would end offline Outlook support for Hotmail, effectively imprisoning user’s messages inside Microsoft services, without even a paid for option for IMAP or POP access.

Technicalities aside – portability is really about ethics and ownership. In an marketplace where users are directly contributing assets to the success of a service, we need to be able to assert ownership over those contributions and demand mechanisms to support that ownership.

The component technologies and infrastructure exist and are in place to make this happen – iSync, AIR, Creative Commons, APML, OpenID, etc. – but the demand from users and pressure on service providers isn’t strong enough yet.

Web workers have been the early adopters of this culture and I feel we should be at the forefront of demanding change amongst service providers. There’s a leadership for this community to take in improving web culture for everyone.

The Data Portability group seeks to create ‘a distributed file system for data, bringing existing open standards together’ but the user experiences remain undefined, overtaken by the necessary development of standards and practices. However, perhaps ‘file system’ is the key to understanding what this user experience might be…

This week saw the release of Flickfs (originally reported by LifeHacker), an application that lets Linux users mount their Flickr account as a virtual filesystem, enabling users to drag & drop photos between their desktop and their Flickr account. Notably, the metadata associated with each photo is rendered as an attached file.

Orienting data from applications around the desktop is actually a very smart move – enabling application developers to focus on simply providing mappings between virtual files and data, letting users use tried and trusted desktop metaphors and mechanisms to backup, duplicate, copy and migrate their data.

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• chat
• blogs
• wikis
• mailing lists + forums
• photo albums
• links (centralized bookmarks)
• maps
• subgroups
• personal profiles
• calendaring

Grou.ps has smartly offered these tools in such a way to capitalize on your existing assets on the web.  That is, your list of links can be based off links already existent on del.icio.us, your photo gallery can be made up of pictures from Flickr, log entries can come from an exisitng blog on the web, and finally, collaborative member’s updates can come from Twitter, if they wish.

These modules exist on an attractive webpage that contain your own template, absent of any branding.  Modules can be customized through extensive preference options.  No ads or branding exist on the site, including the emails that are sent out from the service to users.  Want to access your Grou.ps site on your mobile phone?  No problem – just surf to your site’s mobile address.

Grou.ps’ main advantage to collaboration is they allow you to leverage assets your team already has established on the Internet.  Similar to Tumlr, this means you don’t have pictures, links, and other assets existing in multiple places, minimizing maintenance.

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