Uhh oh, my hidden weblog experiment has been outted by my friend Hugh Pyle. I guess it is time to learn how to do a weblog right.
In the meantime, for those who do not know of Hugh Pyle, he is an extraordinarly insightful observer of the world of people, computers and resulting cultures.
Hugh coded up some amazingly prescient and useful pieces of code for Groove as an independent developer. He wrote the popular PinBoard tool, which makes a Groove space feel less like a Lotus Notes discussion -- brrrrrrrr -- and more like the kitchen in your favorite home, with scraps of "what's happening" pinned up on the refrigerator. The beginnings of Cultureware, indeed.
The folks at Groove were smart enough to read the writing on the "fridge", hired Hugh and moved him from England to Beverly MA, where he did work on the MS Sharepoint - Groove 2.5 integration, among other projects. Thank you, Hugh!
While independent, Hugh also coded up a forward-looking, WebCam tool (alpha) for Groove. Geez, I would love to see a robust version of this visionary code come out of Groove's HQ or from one of their skilled Third Party Developers. MS NetMeeting is frought with Firewall traversal problems.
Hugh wrote another bit of prescient code: a NewsReader tool (alpha) for Groove. But, with Hugh now deep within Groove, how will this get bumped up to the priority I want? Like, I want a great NewsReader for Groove, NOW.
Well, the good news is that Tim Knip is doing all sorts of exciting work on Groove Interop tools. Tim has even written a Blogging Tool (alpha) for Groove.
Similarly good news: there is now an awesome beta of a NewsReader with a lovely three pane UI, written in .NET Framework: NewsDesk. While NewsDesk is still under developement, it shows wonderful promise: good features and good graphics. Give it a try.
Who knows, maybe we can look forward to David Peckham of NewsDesk and Tim Knip of GrooveInterop tool fame putting their heads together and coming up with a native GrooveTool NewsDesk.
How cool when people working on a project, effected by the news of markets, customers and competitors, have instant access to their colleagues' best thinking and progress, not bounded by location or time zones, even at 30,000 feet.
Best of all, the news, developments and thinking that impact you can show up in the CONTEXT of the shared spaces and project work you are doing with colleagues, 'now and up-to-date', securely: NOT like shrapnel embedded across the giga-acre of 'lost and found' we call "my e-mail inbox + my favorites + my documents + some random news reader + sent mail + MS Project ++"
Any application that can provide unifying 'points-of-view' on my work (and my world) will be real evidence of Jon Udell's notion that Groove 2.5 and it's Web Services are delivering, what O/Ses of the future promise.
As friend Paul Saffo, of the Institute for the Future says. "The future is easy to predict, because the future is not uniformly distributed."
3:46:41 PM 
|
