Sparkspring

Simple but smart

I’ve just started testing Sepia Labs’ new private group sharing product Glassboard.

As with many of these new private sharing services it’s hard to ignore the tumble weeds as they blow past while you wait for your friends and family to join up too. If they can even be bothered that is.

Glassboard have done something simple but very smart to help alleviate this problem. By letting new users join up to an existing group to which everyone is invited, this immediately lets you do three important things: Feel there is an existing community around the product, talk directly to the creators by submitting feedback and feature requests and finally discover people with whom you may wish to share privately in another board.

Glassboard also benefit by getting immediate and direct feedback on the product and can gauge the success of the on-boarding process in realtime. As always it’s the little things.

Interview with Hojoki

App activity stream service Hojoki has been on my radar a while now and I thought it high time I found out a little more.

Describing themselves as ‘making all your cloud apps work as one’ I like to see them as the Twitter for apps. Activity streams are everywhere in our personal lives so why not get the benefit as we work?

How long has Hojoki been going and from where did it spring?
Hojoki was founded a little over a year ago. The founders were involved in research in the field of activity streams and productivity in particular. They saw that something was missing in the area and decided to work on a solution. This became Hojoki.

How many employees do you have on the team?
At the moment, there are 10 of us.

How many users do you have?
Our user numbers are in the 5 digits and growing rapidly.

What is the average number of Workspaces users create?
We’ve discovered there are two types of users. One who use Hojoki to monitor their tools and the other who collaborate. People who monitor have fewer workspaces but still some and those who collaborate have many workspaces and sometimes tens of collaborators in each one.

What is your definition of an app?
My definition of an app would be a tool that serves a purpose and initially, we are focusing on productivity apps.

Who do you see as your competitors?
We do something very new and naturally there are not many competitors out there. Of course, we see some new startups following a similar approach (busyflow.com, 300.mg). 

How important is mobile to you (iOS and Android apps)?
Very important. We’re currently developing our mobile app for both. We’re going to release them at The Next Web conference later this month.

What is your view on the web versus non-web (mobile only) apps (e.g. Path, Instagram)?
I think that, with productivity, both are necessary as people haven’t quite moved away from their computers in this field, but do need to keep informed and work away on the move too.

What are your views on the usefulness of email in the context of services trying to reinvent it (Fluent.io, Shortmail) and the shift towards activity streams and realtime micro-messages of the sort attached to collaborative documents and to-do items.
I think email is still very useful for certain types of correspondence. When it comes to collaboration and when one needs speedy feedback, realtime is the way to go. Hojoki tries to bring this platform to teams. There’s no need to send an email for feedback and refer to or include a link/attachment to a file, just write what you want in Hojoki. It’s that simple. 

What are the benefits of linking many and varied apps compared to the one-stop-shop solution of services like Bascecamp and Wunderkit?
Well, we feel that people already use separate apps for everything and they love these apps. If we were to create our own versions, people might not get that same feeling, so we decided to integrate the best apps out there into one platform.

Do you see Hojoki as an app only for small ‘private’ teams or do you foresee features for sharing certain things outside the Hojoki garden?
At the moment Hojoki is a private space but we plan to release an API that will let you export your activities. This will open up Hojoki and you could use this any way you’d like to.

What are your favourite apps and/ or services (not neccessarily supported by Hojoki)?
Cloud App and Google Docs are two of my favourite as with them two alone you can do an awful lot.

As a freemium product how do you gauge the right time to add ‘premium’ features?
We’re going to do that at the close of our beta, when we have features we think power users will want and will love to pay for them.

What are the benefits of being based in Germany?
The data protection laws are a huge advantage. These guarantee that your data is safe. 

Where do you see Hojoki in a year’s time and in five year’s time?
In a year, to have a suite of tools that cater for everyone and to have features to make Hojoki a must-have.
In five, to be the cloud aggregator and collaboration suite. Have all the apps you could want integrated and a huge amount of power users who love Hojoki like we and others do already.

Many thanks to Adam Bannister, Community Manager at Hojoki.

Micro messaging

An extract from Keith Teare’s post on Techcrunch

As Android, iPhone and other mobile platforms grow we are moving away from the page based Internet. The new Internet is app centric and often message-centric. The number of users engaged in this app-centric and message-centric Internet is both huge and their use is growing. People used Instagram for images, not Flickr or Picasa. They use Foursquare for checkins not Facebook. And they do so in large numbers and they do it a lot.

The interesting part of this is Keith’s observation of not only a shift towards apps but towards messages too.

My view is that it’s not just Twitter and Facebook that are eroding our use of email but the myriad products and services which provide realtime messaging around collaborative documents and even To-Do items.

It’s not what but how

Some of the best practitioners of so-called social media aren’t even aware they’re doing it. Largely because they don’t think of it as such. They are simply communicating and sharing in an honest and open way. The secret is that’s not all about them. Actually it almost always is but it’s about them indirectly and cumulatively.

Don’t tell people who and what you are. Let them create you for themselves out of your opinions on everything and nothing. You can’t control how people perceive you but you can provide them with the material with which to work. By all means supply the 2 and the 3 but let them decide how and when to make them into a 5.

It really isn’t rocket science.