Webware

NEW YORK--After listening to Jason Fried (37 Signals) give his compelling Web 2.0 Expo talk Wednesday about building companies in the modern world--which could be summed up as "simplify, and don't work too hard doing so"--I walked across the hall to hear Fraser Kelton (Adaptive Blue) discuss the negative ramifications of this strategy.

Kelton posed the question this way in his pre-conference writeup: "What happens when early adopters have become spoiled by single-feature technologies that take no more than a moment to grasp? The challenge faced by the next wave of innovative start-ups for technology adoption increases by an order of magnitude."

The real problem, he said during his talk, is not that Web 2.0 technology is easy to use, it's that it is too easy to build. Which means that there is "too much noise": too many new products vying for the attention of the early adopters who can give a start-up its first taste of success. And blogs don't help, he says: They encourage readers to skim without "chewing" on content, just as they encourage writers to post often and quickly, without writing thoughtful pieces.

In other words, there's a deluge of choice. Yet at the same time, social technologies moving into Web 2.0 products lock users in. Who wants to try a new, possibly better photo-sharing site when he or she has 10,000 photos already in Flickr?

Kelton has two possibly workable solutions to the start-up's dilemma: First, "make magic," he says. But on the back end, not the interface. Build a simple interface to a complicated service that isn't so easily replicated. He points to Google search. Simple UI. Rather complex on the server side.

Second, improve on existing products. Pointing in this example to Summize (acquired by Twitter) and Disqus (we're waiting) as services that add important improvements to existing platforms (Twitter; blogs), Kelton says that a start-up can ride on the success of a previous wave if its founders find a smart way to embed their technology in that of the key players in the market.

Obviously, it's easier to build just another single-function service than it is to come up with a plausible growth strategy and a unique service back-end. So both Fried and Kelton are right: Users gravitate to simplicity and focus. But if your business itself is so simple that anyone can replicate it, you don't have much of a business after all.

Click here for full coverage of Web 2.0 Expo

37signals launched Highrise this morning. It's a customer relationship management (CRM) tool aimed at small groups and medium-size businesses. Highrise is meant to fill the gap between Outlook's contact manager and complicated CRM apps that require an IT department to keep running smoothly. It's also priced below SalesForce.com's Team Edition, with more of an emphasis on contact communication and history, rather than sales and forecasting. It's a Webware solution for people who don't want to install CRM software or manage a huge database, and who need a tool that can be accessed on the go.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Highrise launches with six different plans, five of which are paid services with the benefit of shared group storage, increased contact and collaboration limits, and relation-based information pages called "cases." Each tier of service can be upgraded or downgraded at any time, and there's no contract.

In Highrise, each case file can contain information about multiple companies; contacts; and any important information like notes, shared files, and e-mails. By grouping this information in one place, you can create a detailed history or context for a group or contact. Highrise has some built-in tools for organization as well. You can schedule phone calls, reminders, tasks, or basic to-do lists, and assign or include other Highrise collaborators. It's not nearly as deep a system as you get with 37signals' group collaboration tool Basecamp, but if you see something you want a colleague to follow up on, you can do it without firing up your e-mail client.

For integration with your e-mail, Highrise recommends that you set up your e-mail app to automatically forward everything to a special Highrise address. Highrise will parse your messages, and copy over any attachments along with the original text to the contact's profile page on Highrise. If you haven't already created the contact in Highrise, the app will create it for you.

• Digg to adopt OpenID. Later this year, Digg will be adding OpenID to its site. OpenID, which we looked at back in September, creates a master password similar to what you get with Microsoft's Live ID, but it's not proprietary. (TechCrunch)

• Flickr outage reveals site's scale. Flickr wasn't working yesterday, but fear not--it's back up. The problem mixed up a large number of photos across the site, which quickly led to Yahoo shutting down the service for several hours. Interestingly enough, the outage revealed that at times, the site serves over a billion photos a day. (CNET's Yahoo Blog)

• 37signals shows off a piece of new app Highrise. The first screenshots from the 37signals team have been posted, along with information on managing permissions and groups for its new customer relationship app called Highrise. It may seem a tad on the boring side, but for a collaboration-based tool, choosing who can and can't make changes is important. Previous Highrise coverage here. (Signal vs. Noise)

• Blinkx and Sproose partner for the video search tool. Blinkx, which we checked out at Demo 2007, has partnered with the social search engine Sproose, to provide dynamic search results for Sproose's video search. Sproose lets its users vote on the best results, to make searches more relevant.

Yesterday 37signals founder Jason Fried posted about the team's upcoming contact management app called Highrise. The goal of the app is to help you manage contact information in a better way than relying on Post-its or your current software-based customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Think of it like a Rolodex but with collaboration and more space to write things down. Many people can have access to the same records at once, and from the announcement, 37signals thinks they can do better than your current CRM.

In many ways Highrise is a solution for a problem with Web communication technology: we have these great contact management tools with services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Plaxo to bring them all together, but no way to share them, and add notes or related items. There are a few Web-based CRMs out there, such asFunclient and absoluteBUSY, but none that have the potential to tie into a suite of highly successful Web apps (see Basecamp and Writeboard). I can also see a big use for this for keeping track of friends or colleagues as they move all over the place, more so than relying on LinkedIn or social networks like MySpace and Facebook.

Fried made no mention of pricing or a release date in the Highrise announcement, but noted that the 37signals team is "very happy with it." We'll post something more in-depth as soon as we get our mitts on it.

A little Web service called IMified caught my attention this morning. It is an ambitious service that lets you access several popular Web applications from your instant-messaging client. IMified is a messaging bot (like SmarterChild) that lets you manage your apps via text commands. In theory, it could also be used on any IM-equipped mobile phone to turn the phone into a remote control for your Web apps.

Signing up to the service requires no site registration or passwords. To begin, you just add the messaging bot to your buddy list and send it a message. Adding additional services (like Blogger, Basecamp and Wordpress) is done through a special section of the IMified home page. Besides these services, IMified doubles as its own productivity tool with notes, reminders, and to-do lists.

There are some interesting real world uses for IMified, particularly using collaborative apps like Google Spreadsheets. Here at Webware, we created a couple of Google Spreadsheets to share our ideas. Theoretically, IMified could be used to add items to our spreadsheets. IMified could also be used to live blog from your phone using a service that wasn't intended to do so, such as Backpack from 37Signals.

Adding services to IMified

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Accounts are managed through a special section of IMified's Web site. There you can set up user names and passwords for each service. Compatible IMified sites are set up to work through the developer's API, so if your favorite service doesn't have one, it likely won't be added to IMifieds list.

Having a group of Web apps to access while on the go is an exciting idea. What piques my interest is whether or not the casual user can handle a text-based interface for multiple and visually rich apps. After thoroughly enjoying Google's mobile Gmail application, I'd like to see IMified evolve into a downloadable Java app for phones that could incorporate an easy-to-use graphical interface, yet combine the simplicity and the ease of use that IMified was designed to provide.

[Found on Museum of Modern Betas]

8apps is a suite of Web-based collaboration applications. It's got the look and feel of a site made for casual users but is aimed at small groups who need a place to get business and social networking done in the same place.

Right now there are only three applications to play around with, (Handshake, Orchestrate, and Blueprint) but five more are due out by this fall. The eventual goal is to have eight applications that can be used and managed from one place, kind of like what you get with Zoho's offerings, but more experimental.

Orchestrate and Blueprint both fall under the category of productivity. Orchestrate is an easy-to-manage creation tool for to-do lists. Users can create and edit a series of to-do lists, color code them, and even share them with other 8apps contacts (more on that later). It's pretty easy to use and can handle many different lists at once. Blueprint is a brainstorming tool similar to what you'd get with a white board and some post-it notes. Users can add comments, keywords, and live URLs to the board, although only the owner of the Blueprint can maneuver them around the virtual canvas.

Handshake is 8apps' social-networking application. It lets you make a personalized profile, browse users, and join groups. Each group has its own message board, but that's about it. I'd like to see some event management implementation, so groups can link their Orchestrate or Blueprint projects to the group.

Once you've got a few contacts on 8apps, it's easy to add them to your Orchestrate and Blueprint projects. There is, however, no way to add non-8apps users to your projects as guests--something I think most people would find quite useful.

8apps is fast, slick, and simple. I like where this idea is going, as working on projects with other people from different geographical locations often means using public computers or machines that might not have the right software. That being said, it's still a little ways off before I'd use it instead of 37signals or Zoho for my collaborative needs. 8apps is in private beta. We've got 15 beta invites to give out. If interested, leave your e-mail in 'you(at)mail.com' style in the comments.

[via Museum of Modern Betas]

(Credit: CNET Networks)