This is the new Dropio interface with a chat pop-up at the bottom.
(Credit: Dropio)When Facebook announced that its news feed would turn into a real-time "stream" of updates and media, it became clear that the Twitter-like model of fast-moving information flow was gaining a real foothold in the dot-com world.
Now, file-sharing service Dropio has opted to turn its "drops"--the pages where people can drag and drop any number of multimedia files and then password-protect them--into streams optimized for collaborative work. If you're working in one of them, it updates instantly for all users.
There's also a new feature, much like in Google Docs, Zoho, and other collaboration tools, which lets all members looking at a given "drop" chat with one another. Dropio has also turned on access to drops from third-party chat clients with Jabber support, like Adium and Pidgin.
But founder and CEO Sam Lessin said that he doesn't see the collaboration-focused new development as bringing Dropio, which turned on Twitter support last summer, in competition with the Web's numerous productivity-suite applications.
"We're still not interested in, and we're not competing in the 'let's open up a document and edit it together in real time' space," Lessin said to CNET News. "I've yet to see...a normal workflow where you want to do that. The workflow for us is much more along the lines of opening up a pipe between 15 people who are collaborating or 100 people who are in a conference audience and let them collaborate around the event."
A more direct competitor, he said, would be the 37Signals product Campfire.
Productivity application start-up Zoho is in a tough position: it has to compete with Google Apps. That hasn't stopped the company from pushing forward and trying new stuff.
Case in point: Zoho's Marketplace, which launched Tuesday. Through the Marketplace, Zoho users can make a buck or two off of applications that they built with Zoho Creator, the company's drag-and-drop application development tool.
If you've made an application in Creator, you can list it for sale in the Marketplace and charge a fee, if you want. Zoho doesn't take a commission from the sale of applications, but if you use Creator (or any other Zoho app) more than its personal-use plan permits, you'll have to cough up a subscription fee. This goes for app creators as well--if a lot of people are using your applications, you'll have to pay too.
Zoho isn't trying to create a get-rich-quick scheme here. "There are many applications out there that are not available off the shelf but are needed in a particular use case or situation," an explanation from the company read, "but there is not enough (of a) market for vendors to offer such situated software, as the need could be specific to a use case or an individual/business."
In conjunction with the release of its Marketplace, Zoho also launched Version 3.0 of Creator.
Google announced on its official blog late Wednesday that Google Sites, its simplified Web site creation service, is now available to any registered Google user.
Previously, only businesses with Google Apps accounts and their own domains had had access to Google Sites.
Unlike the free Web site creation services of yesteryear (and by yesteryear, I mean 1998), Google Sites are collaborative, which engineering manager Andrew Zaeske said in the announcement makes them ideal for "team projects, company intranets, community groups, classrooms, clubs, family updates, you name it."
No HTML knowledge is required, and sites are hosted for free at Google domains like sites.google.com/organicwheatgrassmoothieclub.
Google Sites got its start when Google acquired wiki platform JotSpot in 2006.
Short version: Wetpaint might be one to watch.
Long version: TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has alerted us to a dark horse candidate in the race to dominate the land of wikis. It's Wetpaint, a Seattle-based service we haven't heard a whole lot from lately. The reason, Arrington says, is that it's positioning itself to be a player in niche social networks, not just mini-Wikipedias.
The easy-to-create wiki service pulled in 3 million page views in March, according to ComScore numbers, compared with 3.8 million for Ning, the well-funded social-network creator helmed by Marc Andreessen. Wetpaint also claims 900,000 wikis have been created, far more than the 263,000 that Ning counts (though who knows how many of those are legitimate and/or active). While Ning's way ahead in traffic, a few months ago Wetpaint released a set of features to ramp up social-networking activity on the site, with friends lists, news feeds, member profiles, and Yelp-style "compliments" now in the mix.
There are also 70 "sponsored" Wetpaint wikis, like the fan wikis created by cable network Showtime for each of its programs.
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