That’s why it’s fun to come across a startup like Firefly, the creation of four University of Pennsylvania undergraduates who want to make it drop-dead easy for companies to guide customers through their websites by co-browsing or sharing screens without plugins or downloads.

So if you’re perusing your a healthcare provider’s web site and get stuck on a form, the customer service agent can with a button click,  get in and share that screen — without seeing any of the user’s other tabs or screens — to walk the user through the process. To facilitate this, the company just adds a few lines of JavaScript code to the URL header.

The product has gotten some ink  and it is cool. But what impressed me was the co-founders. I met two of the three – Wharton undergrads Patrick Leahy and Justin Meltzer  – at Boston AngelHack last spring, when Leahy was in in the midst of a hackathon road trip.

Just coming off the 48-hour Penn Apps hackathon, Leahy Bolt-bused up to Cambridge for the 30-hour Boston AngelHack, before jumping aboard StartupBus, a 70-hour hackathon-on-wheels to South By Southwest, where he was going to participate in — wait for it — another hackathon. Code means a lot to this guy…

Firefly co-founder Patrick Leahy

Foresaking Wall Street for code

So much, in fact, that Leahy turned down an investment banking internship with a New York financial services giant to focus on programming. “I did one internship on derivatives trading last year and liked it and was going to go back for investment banking, but I want to build the company,” Leahy told me by phone last week.

Leahy and another Firefly co-founder Dan Shipper are startup veterans, having already launched Airtime for Email, which gives companies a way to brand their marketing messages in email and track how those emails are treated. Were they read? Nuked? Forwarded? Never opened?

Leahy speaks about code as someone who is knowledgeable but still eager to learn. “We wrote the first version of Firefly at Penn Apps using Ruby on Rails but we couldn’t get to the level of complexity we needed so we rewrote it at AngelHack in Node.js. We learned that language at AngelHack and it’s perfect for what we needed,” Leahy said.

Picking the right tools

“Programming languages are like different sized kitchen knives — they suit different jobs,” he said. Ruby on Rails is a great framework for building “CRUD”  or Create, Read, Update, Delete — applications, he said. ”If you have a big table you want to edit — a customer information page, your sales rep page, Ruby on Rails if fine,” he said.

But for Firefly, which needs to handle fast browser-to-browser communication, Node.js was better. “We have to pass messages back and forth so our server sits in the middle and we wrote code to connect all those browsers. This is an evented pattern where you’re having a conversation, listening for things to be said and holding till you hear them. Ruby on Rails is not good for that but a functional programming language like JavaScript makes it easy to call a function to handle an event,” he added.

The Firefly foursome used to work out of dorms and apartments but is moving into the offices of First Round Capital, although there are no plans to take venture funding yet.

To be sure, Firefly isn’t entering an empty stage. LogMeIn offers a popular screen charing application and Salesforce.com bought GoInstant a screen-sharing company in July for $70 million. But Salesforce is attacking big companies with a full array of analytics and other perks while Firefly focuses on customer service and might be more attractive to smaller companies. Whatever the competitive landscape,  I wouldn’t sell this team short. They show a remarkable maturity that complements their youthful exuberance. Asked if Firefly was seeking venture capital, Leahy was cautious.

“We want to get to free cash flow and get stable before thinking about raising money from outside. We want to make sure we can manage our own money first,” Leahy said.

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“Over the next five years this will start sweeping through companies. In the same ways that Rypple has taken this model of social networking as a fundamental design point and applied it to performance management systems, I think you’re going to see it apply to a lot of systems, whether it’s recruiting, compensation or learning systems. I think it will eventually hit things like your financial budgeting and planning systems, your project systems, anything where the work is inherently social,” he said.

That’s a lot of social. But hopefully, in Saleforce’s vision of how things unfold, not a lot of different social tools. We spoke with to Dave King, director of product marketing for Chatter, about new real-time chat and screen sharing features for enterprise social network Chatter that the company is announcing today, and he explained that the overarching aim of the new additions to the product is to integrate “islands of communication” so that employees need not switch through multiple tools but can access this growing array of social processes through Chatter. Salesforce wants, in effect, to link these islands together and create a Pangaea of social with Chatter at its center.

Looking very much like a Gchat within Chatter, the new messaging tool lets workers message others, either singly or in groups of up to ten, within the organization (i.e. other Chatter users at the company) without having to switch windows or open another application. Your buddy list is automatically generated from all those you’re already connected to on Chatter. The in-browser screen sharing application is designed to replace the likes of WebEx for internal discussions. Both tools are freely available to all existing customers as of today, as well as those using the free version of the product.

This additional functionality is good news for current users, but it’s also interesting in what it indicates about where Salesforce sees social tools going. “Every business process has a combination of unstructured or social processes and structured processes,” King explains. “Let’s take recruiting. When I’m recruiting maybe I email a PDF of the resume around and I’m IMing people who interviewed the candidate to get their feedback, but all of those things are in different places.”

Chatter wants to be your portal into all those actions and to the increasing array of business areas that Wookey predicted are getting a social overhaul. “We think it all needs to be united. So let’s say your files are in SharePoint and maybe you have an HR system in a different place, Chatter, with our Chatter Connect API, can be the unifying social layer that really brings all those things together,” King says, who added that Salesforce is also hoping to enable collaboration with those external to Chatter through the platform in the future.

Rather than tools proliferating as more processes go social, Salesforce wants all of those additional functions to integrate with Chatter. That’s good for the company, of course, as their products become more tightly woven into ever more aspects of your business, but the message out of Salesforce is it’s also a matter of increased efficiency for the user.

Do you see an integrated platform model dominating the future of social, or are we more likely to see a profusion of “social islands” dominate the scene for a good while yet?

Image courtesy of Salesforce.

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1. The iPhone. It seems like a no-brainer, but in terms of actual impact on my day-to-day life, nothing beats Apple’s smartphone for transformative power. The iPhone was my first smartphone, and though I’ve temporarily strayed once or twice since then, it remains my go-to mobile device. But why should I be thankful for a device that costs me an arm and a leg each year when I upgrade, and also natters me incessantly with notifications, both meaningful and otherwise?

Because for all its downsides, the iPhone means that I can better stay in touch with friends and loved ones. It also provides tons of entertainment, has reduced the amount of devices I lug around on most trips from four or five to one or two, and includes all the joy of an iPod, too, which would’ve made this list if it wasn’t for the iPhone.

2. Screen sharing built into every Mac. If you manage a multi-Mac household or small business, you know what I’m talking about here. The ability to quickly and easily view and interact with the desktop of any Mac on your local Wi-Fi network is an amazing time-saver that lets me update, manage applications for and coordinate the efforts of all four Macs in operation at my home from my central work computer. Girlfriend runs into a technical problem? Connect, fix, done.

3. iTunes Home Sharing. This feature was one that made a lot of sense for long before it was implemented. Why shouldn’t any Mac or iOS device on your local network play back your iTunes library, so long as they have the proper credentials? That you can both stream and transfer music between libraries on Macs has saved me a lot of headaches, and size restrictions on iPod touches (which usually remain in the house anyways) are no longer an issue.

4. Combo audio in/out ports with remote control. Some will no doubt call me crazy for putting this on a list of tech I’m most thankful for, but considering how much I use it, I don’t think it’s out of place here. Obviously on iPhones and iPod touches it’s great for answering calls and controlling playback, but it also works terrifically well when on your MacBook or iPad watching movies or fielding Skype calls. It’s a thing that I never missed until I had it, and now can’t live without, even on my desktop iMac.

5. The App Store. Another pretty obvious one, but my appreciation has some qualifications. For example, I think the vast majority of the App Store is pretty much a waste of time; even well-designed apps aren’t necessarily useful in the long term. But for the few apps that remain glued to my home screen, like Delivery Status Touch, Next TTC, Instapaper and Reeder, the App Store’s thousands of low-quality, throwaway applications are more than endurable.

Those are my five, but I doubt they’re everyone else’s too. Let us know what Apple tech you’re most thankful for in the comments.

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Note that for Screen Sharing to work, you either need to be on the same network as the Mac you’re trying to access, use Back to My Mac with MobileMe, or use a VPN client like Hamachi.

Per-user and Apple ID login

You can now log into other Macs on your network not only with an authorized user account on that machine, but also with an Apple ID. Plus, you can also specify individuals manually, or add them from your Address Book, who are also allowed to login remotely on a per-user basis, and provide each with a unique password of your choosing. That eliminates the need to create a separate user account just for remote access, since you can just add your son or daughter from your Address Book and send them a password, allowing them to gain remote access if you need tech support, for example.

To add users, go to the Sharing pane in System Preferences, make sure Screen Sharing is turned on, and hit the “+” button to select people from your Address Book contacts. Hit the “New Person” button to authorize people manually.

Observe mode

In previous incarnations of Screen Sharing, you could take over control of another computer, but if you wanted to step back and watch what was happening on said computer, it was fairly tricky. Basically, you had to make another window active and just not touch anything. Now, you can switch to Observe mode, which is perfect for those times when you want to watch what a user is doing in order to provide them with accurate tech support help.

To switch to Observe mode, you can add an icon to the toolbar (pictures, via View > Customize Toolbar…), or go to View > Switch to Observe Mode in the menu bar.

Virtual Display mode

If you want to just change a setting or start a download without interrupting someone else currently using the computer you’re accessing via Screen Sharing, there’s a new Virtual Display mode designed to do just that. It will provide you with your own desktop that doesn’t interfere with what’s currently being shown on the Mac’s actual connected display. This is perfect for running application updates on your parents’ computer while they browse uninterrupted, for instance.

Virtual Display option greyed out here because Screen Sharing is in Observe mode.

If you’re logging into another Mac with per-user permissions, as described above, you’ll be asked whether you want to view the hardware or a virtual display. You can also access Virtual Display mode by going to View > Switch to Virtual Display in the menu bar, and change back to the hardware display by going to View > Switch to Hardware Display.

I find I’m already using these new features quite a bit. How are you finding Screen Sharing in OS X Lion?

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The new feature is built into the latest version of the GoToMeeting software, and doesn’t require any fancy equipment — any webcam and microphone will do, although headsets will most likely be needed to keep room noise down, or users can choose to dial into an audio bridge. Each stream can be displayed at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, for a total maximum resolution of 1920 x 960 pixels.

I attended a demo with four attendees, and found it to be easy to use, and the quality to be very good. If you’ve used GoToMeeting before, you know that the software (available for Windows or Mac) is  quick to download, and doesn’t generally require any fiddling with settings. Audio was perfect, and video quality was quite acceptable for standard “talking head” meetings. The folks at GoToMeeting told me that they decided to limit the service to six simultaneous users in order to maintain video quality — plus, with more users, the video thumbnails for each person would be pretty hard to see.

The program automatically displays a split screen divided into the appropriate number of boxes need to show each participant, and a screen sharing space when desired. GoToMeeting has added some useful touches, like a subtle white outline that shows who’s talking at any given moment, and the ability to resize the viewable area to maximize the shared desktop if desired.

The new service occupies a niche between Skype and some of the higher-end video conferencing options that require sophisticated hardware. For organizations and individuals that won’t use the service often enough to justify GoToMeeting’s cost, similar technology will be available later in the year through Skype, since Citrix will be powering Skype’s upcoming web conferencing service.

HDFaces is available to existing GoToMeeting customers and trial users at no additional cost over the service’s standard pricing, which begins at $49/month or $468/year. A 30-day free online trial is available at the service’s website.

Do you use GoToMeeting? Will the addition of video capabilities make the service more attractive?

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For non-Premium users, there are some improvements that make it a worthwhile upgrade from version 5.1. For one, it seems to be a lot less buggy than previous versions, which for me frequently had trouble with landline calls and some freezing issues. The UI also boasts some small changes, like the ability to completely hide the sidebar menu to make it easier to focus on a single conversation. You can also now pop out video controls in a small hovering window when you interact with other applications or your desktop. This keeps the person you’re talking with on top and visible, and also allows you quick access to hang up and mute commands.

The changes should appeal to Skype power-users, and especially those Premium subscribers who use group calling for meetings and virtual conferences. The new screen-sharing options (limited to OS X for now) make video chat a whole lot more productive, and Skype still offers the best video chat quality of any of the various OS X options that I’ve seen. Our readers seem to agree, as more than half chose Skype as their Mac video chat client of choice in our recent poll. It’s nice to see that even after acquisition by Microsoft, Skype’s presence on other platforms isn’t being ignored, especially now that Google seems to be interested in making a big play in the group video chat market.

Unfortunately, the new UI Skype introduced in 5.0 and refined slightly in 5.1 remains largely unchanged. It’s still too big and obtrusive for an app that would be served better by being more inconspicuous. There are quite a few tutorials out there providing instructions for downgrading to the more simplified and minimalist Skype 2.8, and if you’re not a Premium user, this new version doesn’t really offer much incentive to upgrade. Since group calling and group screen sharing only require one Premium user to initiate, however, you might want to suck it up and make the switch, just so you can use the new features if a request to do so comes your way.

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The new features allow for the creation of “companies,” based on email domain names, which give users the ability to share presentations and meeting recordings with individuals and groups with the company for evaluation and training purposes. Meeting recordings include both notes taken during the meeting and audio; these recording are synchronized with the presentation during playback. Video recordings are planned for a future version.

The app also now provides administrators with more sophisticated tools to review, analyze and manage how presentations are used. There is also a completely new system to search and filter content by customer or employee, with more filters are being developed in response to the feedback of beta users. These new features will allow organizations to evaluate in detail how effective presentations — and even specific slides — are. They can also be used to set up A/B testing to compare presentations.

CrunchConnect is currently in private beta, but invitations are available to WebWorkerDaily readers here. The service is free for now; after the beta period has ended, users will be able to choose from free and paid plans.

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In the version of Screen Sharing that currently ships with Mac OS X Snow Leopard (1.1.1), users can log in to a remote system, but will only see the screen that’s currently active on the target computer. Mouse or keyboard is shared between the remote computer, and the computer using Screen Sharing to remotely access it, so if a user was actively interacting with each, only one could effectively use the target computer at one time. In Lion, however, a local user can go about their business uninterrupted, while a remote users enjoys their own separate graphical session.

Screen Sharing also gets some additional tools borrowed from Apple Remote Desktop (ARD), which is the professional remote management and distribution client Apple sells, aimed mostly at business and enterprise users. Screen Sharing lifts an Observe mode (viewing, but no control), a Control mode, and a Screen Capture tool from ARD.

Screen Sharing’s new multiple user login support and ARD features should make it a fairly capable tool for managing small, Mac-based offices, or for managing a home network of Macs. It will, for instance, be possible to remote into another computer using an admin account and change software installations or perform remote upgrades while the local user works away uninterrupted. Apple seems keen on breaking down the barrier between consumer and professional software (Lion Server will be integrated free in the regular shipping version of Mac OS X Lion, for example); this Screen Sharing redesign is another step in that direction, and one which small businesses will relish.

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CrunchConnect’s web conferencing and screen-sharing system has some useful features, including:

• Dedicated web addresses and phone conference numbers (users can also have the service call them directly)
• Option for participants to sign in via LinkedIn, so others can see their profiles; the system also displays participants’ Twitter profiles
• A “waiting room,” where participants can communicate before an event begins
• Ability for hosts to upload presentations in advance
• Ability to record meetings
• Analytics tools, to track what parts of presentations are viewed and for how long.

CrunchConnect was developed with sales in mind, so it has some SlideRocket-like features, such as being able to update presentations even after they’ve been shared. A “company” function will shortly be added, for creating libraries of slides that can be shared and updated centrally. CrunchConnect doesn’t have the sophisticated online editing functions of SlideRocket, though; you’ll need to create your presentations offline and upload them. The service supports PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx) formats, as well as JPG, PNG, and GIF images. PDF support will be added soon.

I experimented a little with CrunchConnect as a presenter and as a meeting participant, and so far, I’ve found the web-based system works pretty smoothly. It doesn’t require any software to be downloaded, which is helpful. There’s not much documentation yet, although I haven’t really felt the need for it.

CrunchConnect is currently in private beta, but the developer has provided 500 WebWorkerDaily readers with access. You can sign up here. The service is free for now; after the beta period has ended, users will be able to choose from free and paid plans.

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I downloaded the Mac version of the new beta to try it out, and it works well; the HTML viewer is even usable on my iPhone’s browser. I can imagine the new whiteboard feature, which enables participants to draw directly on the screen, being especially useful in collaborative design sessions, for example. However, despite apparently having redesigned the user interface, I don’t think the company has addressed all Imran’s original concerns about the app’s design and ease of use. Many of the other screen sharing and conferencing apps available — YuuGuu and join.me, for example — are very easy to use. Mikogo’s interface makes use of lots of difficult to decipher icons, and even with plenty of  pop-up help windows, the app is less intuitive than I would like. I’m also not sure why the Mac version has only one download for both initiating and viewing sessions, while Windows users have two separate downloads.

For casual, off-the-cuff, screen sharing sessions, I’d recommend the simpler join.me instead, especially as it also allows participants to join sessions only using a web browser. That said, while it might take a bit of getting used to, Mikogo does offer many useful additional features over join.me, such as multi-monitor support, multi-user whiteboarding and  allowing participants to remotely control the host’s mouse pointer and keyboard, which may make it a better option in certain situations, such as remote support or collaborating on design work (although I should note that it looks like participants using the HTML viewer cannot contribute to whiteboarding sessions or remotely control the host’s computer; they’ll need to download the app to do so).

Mikogo is free; you don’t even have to register to use it, although some features, like the Scheduler, require you to set up an account. You can download the beta of Mikogo 4.0 here.

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