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I think this is big news...
"Google has linked up with IT consultancy and outsourcing specialist CapGemini to target corporate customers with its range of desktop (er, web) applications, in the search engine's most direct move against the dominance of Microsoft."
The Guardian has the rejigged press release, and Nick Carr has more detail.
I've just posted a fairly long post about this on Participo; I'll pull out some of my key points that I think are pertinent to where I see relevance to ThinkFold.
Massive growth in collaborating outside of the Outlook address book
The ability to collaborate 'outside of the Exchange group' is starting to become a real issue. I see this with clients who've outsourced key business processes, and then hit a wall when it comes to meaningful collaboration with these companies.
More nuanced, 'brainstorming' requirement between employees, partners
Hosting spreadsheets and word processing 'between' these organisational groups is an obvious solution - but that focuses on the 'paper shuffling' bit of the process, what about the less structured, but critical brainstorming and idea generation phase? Being able to rapidly share and manage notes from calls, structure ideas and share initial plans is where I think ThinkFold sits...drop me a line if you agree :-)
Why it might be too late for Google
I've realised that Microsoft's knowledge sharing/collaboration strategy pitch with SharePoint, is to maintain the paradigm of document (i.e. Office file) creation. That makes sense if maintaining the Office suite and Exchange is a massive cash cow (which it is, for MS).
But as an employee, if I'm going to share my documents through the web, I might as well make them web pages? Physical Office has less and less relevance for me, both as a place and a software suite.I've gone into more depth about the demise of tradtional IT and th si shift to pages vs. files over in the original post.
I've just been watching a great video from TED of the designer, Stefan Sagmeister talking about things that make him happy.
It's a lovely, simple talk, punctuated by some simple lists he's made. I grabbed a screenshot of one of his lists, where he's thought about the things he's learnt that make him happy (click the image to see the full size version).
A list is such a basic thing to do, but can be really profound, as in this case.
One of the things we want to do with ThinkFold is enable people to share the lists they make, with each-other and the public at large. Enabling people to share outlines could be a really simple but profound way to share ideas in an easy to grasp format.
HogBay software (aka Jesse Grosjean), maker of the fantastic WriteRoom, has an idea to build a lightweight Getting Things Done app, called TaskPaper (a brilliant product name, don't you think?).
TaskPaper is interesting for a number of reasons (clutter-free GTD, simplicity and lack of 'SUV' features as product differentiation come to mind), but the thing that really caught my eye was the highly intelligent conversation in the forum between Jesse and his (future) TaskPaper customers.
The people in the forum are basically helping to refine the approach and functions of the application while it's in the design phase - there's a significant amount of careful thought and suggestions, and it really feels like TaskPaper will be imprived because of the time and thought gone into the forum posts. In fact there's one point where the feedback has clearly improved Jesse's ideas (relating to nuances of how text will be stored.)
It's a real inspiration for my personal goal to get our forums up and running when we finally get to public beta, I hope we'll be as lucky to get the level of insight and contribution as Hogbay has from it's interested users.
One of the really tough problems Matt's had to solve whilst building ThinkFold, is how to deal with the loss of internet connectivity whilst someone is in the middle of typing into a realtime outline. During normal realtime outlining, your text is sent to the server as you type and displayed to everyone sharing the outline. 
But what should happen if you temporarily lose your internet connection whilst typing? We don't want you to lose any of your ideas or flow, or even worse, lose any text that you just typed.
So, we've built a feature into ThinkFold called 'ghosting' that auto-saves your work. (click the image to see a QuickTime movie of auto-save and ghosting in action) If you're unfortunate enough to lose your internet connection while outlining in ThinkFold, you can still keep on typing for a short while.ThinkFold will auto-save your typed text into a small, hidden file on your own computer.
When you're able to reconnect to the internet and reload your real-time outline, a 'ghost' version of yourself enters the outline and types your auto-saved text into the outline.
ThinkFold's 'ghosting' feature lets you use an outline in with a 'patchy' connection, (like a 3G modem), safe in in the knowledge that everything you're outlining will be saved.
In my previous post, I didn't mention the classic (i.e. first) outlining app that came bundled with a web server - Userland's Radio , or was it a web server with an outliner? (nope, that was the even earlier Frontier).
I loved Radio - it enabled me, with Active Renderer, to publish my outlines to co-workers. It was all one-way, but gave me a taste of how useful shared outlines could be.
It's still a great idea by OmniGroup, but, like all things in computing, a twist on a classic idea.
I love reading about the history of outlining.
The use of outliners back in the day are completely analogous to how we see people using ThinkFold. There's a lot of useful experiences and lessons that I'm trying to understand and learn from.
One of the key uses for ThinkFold is to allow groups to outline the flow and output of conversations and meetings, in realtime.
As ThinkFold has been in development, I've been using it to make notes during phone calls, so the other callers see my notes develop, and of course, they add, edit and re-arrange the outline with me, using their own realtime view of the outline.
I also recently started to use ThinkFold in physical meetings - I'll project a ThinkFold outline on the meeting room wall, making notes as we go. People interact with the outline by suggesting edits, or taking my keyboard, and we progressively build the outline; allocating actions to people, breaking down a note into further steps and rearranging connections and notes as we talk.
As the meeting ends, I use ThinkFold's sharing function to invite everyone to the outline, so everyone can see, in a single shared space, what was said, noted and importantly, agreed to. It's an incredibly powerful way to work and make meetings more productive.
These are all uses well understood by experienced outliners - this 'live meeting outline' was a key use in the early 90's - in fact there was even a term developed to describe it - technography (which was eventually trademarked!). I came across this interesting message, from 1999, on dynamic outlining:
"It's this image, of the dynamic outline that is key to understanding the power of technography and the value of the outliner as a tool for facilitating collaboration"
Live, shared outlines are definitely one of the key ways that people 'get outlining' - I see smart people go through an epiphany moment when they see an outliner used in this way.
Here's a brilliant write up of experiencing Dave Winer's outliner, More, for the first time in the early(?) 90's:
"During the meeting, a record of our discussions was added to the outline. The attendees caught on, quickly, to the usefulness of this tool. Suggestions were repeatedly made for adjustments or corrections to the outline. We moved sections of the outline around to optimize the categorization of topics, etc. The outline was kept mostly collapsed, except for the part to which we were adding at the time. We could always see the details in the context of the structure of higher levels of our outline."
Reading these stories is really gratifying - I think that we'll enable people to get the same benefits, brought bang up to date with realtime interaction through a web page.
I love the OmniGroup guys. They build some of the smartest apps on the Mac, including what I think is the best desktop outliner, OmniOutliner.Of course, I've been watching the development of OmniFocus, their GTD app with interest, because it looks like they've nailed desktop GTD like no-one has before, and it's also another fantastic example of the outliner interface in action (I've talked about this previously).I remember watching Merlin Mann talking with OmniGroup back in January about enabling apps for the iPhone. I knew they'd do something web-based, but I didn't expect a fractional horse power http server to get embedded in their latest app.
It's a really smart move to enable lightweight web access to their app's data. It's also interesting that they've adopted a finder-like column view for drilling down into nodes - it's the same approach we've been experimenting with to present readable ThinkFold outlines onto a mobile handset (thought I'd get that in there :-)
I guess the only downside to Omni's current approach is the reluctance, or technical inability to turn on your mac as a web server connected to the scary internet (e.g. it's a macbook, and in a bag, or you don't want to open your cable modem's ports etc.). I wonder if OmniGroup have plans for simple hosted service?
It would be nice to see a blended approach to desktop and web data in that way, regardless of whether my Mac is in a bag etc.
One of the reasons I like to blog on ThinkFold is to share ideas and techniques around the art of thinking and collaborating, as well as talking about the app.
ThinkFold is primarily a thinking tool (Dave Winer calls outliners 'ideas processors' (I love that term), because whether it's outlining an idea, building tasks lists or a presentation, you're still thinking and processing an idea.
I thought I'd write a post talking about a rather superb book, 'A Technique for Producing Ideas' by James Webb Young and how you can combine the technique with an outliner to really kick-start your creativity.
The book is brilliant, because it's a really fast read (you could nail the whole thing in half an hour) and it simply works;five really simple steps for what becomes a repeatable process for generating fresh ideas.
Here's a high-level outline of his 'Technique for Producing Ideas':
1. Gather information.
bq. "...write down the items of specific information as you gather them...after a while you can begin to classify them by sections of your subject. Eventually you will have a whole file box of them, neatly classified..."
As the book was written forty years ago, the tool of choice was a set of index cards. Of course now you can use an outliner as a gatherer and classifier of information.
2. Soak up all your research
This stage is all about synthesising the information:
"You take one fact, and turn it this way and that, look at is in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it...You bring two facts together and see how they fit."
Here you can use an outliner to fold away other information, allowing you to concentrate on one piece of information at a time. When it comes to bringing facts together, you can drag different bits of the outline around, sticking nodes together, seeing how information fits into different groupings.
And don't forget to capture ideas as they start to emerge:
"...little tentative or partial ideas will come to you. Put these down on paper. Never mind how crazy or incomplete they seem: get them down...Keep trying to get one or more partial thoughts onto your little cards."
3. Do something else
Young tells you to go off and do something else - watch a movie, read a book, anything that doesn't involve thinking about the 'idea'. This is to let your subconscious noodle away at the problem.
4. The idea appears
It's the 'eureka' moment where, having let your subconscious work away, the idea comes to you, out of the blue. You better write down that idea, or better still, outline it...
5. Share the idea
The final stage is to share your idea:
"Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious. When you do, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light."
Well, all you need to do here is share your outline! See what other people think - they can enhance your original idea by adding ideas directly into your outline...
So that's it - five simple steps, coupled with a good thinking/processing tool and you're on your way to great ideas!
By the way, you can find the full text of this book as a PDF on the web - if you grab the PDF and find it useful, buy the book for a friend. It's only a fiver - that's a pound per technique!
I just wrote a long post on Participo about the (a)buse of PowerPoint in organisations.
The last section was on the intellectual content locked away in PowerPoint, and I've re-posted it here, as it describes one of the primary use cases for ThinkFold in companies - enhancing presentations through collaborative outlining.
Any company I've ever been in creates hundreds, if not thousands of ideas. These ideas were invariably created and shared using PowerPoint. And now those same ideas, the result of hours of hard work and intellectual output are locked away into PowerPoint slidesets, sitting on shared drives, hard disks, and (if the company is really switched on) on SharePoint drives, or a Google Search Appliance's index.
But it's just the PowerPoint file - that's a lot of intellectual capital sitting there, as structured slides, but without any context, and certainly not being re-used in any meaningful way.
Imagine a different way of building, sharing and re-using these ideas. The ThinkFold way.
People would outline their presentation ideas before moving into the constraint of PowerPoint. The ideas would be shared and developed with co-workers in a single idea workspace, without sending PowerPoint files back and forth.
When the ideas are ready, the core ideas go into a micropresentation - 15 slides, 20 seconds each format (more on micropresentations in my Participo post.)-> Take a typical 30 minute meeting (What? Your meetings take longer than that?). Kick off with the micropresentation. That takes just 5 minutes .
The remaining 25 minutes is a conversation where reactions and ideas are captured into a shared outline during the meeting - the same outline that the micropresentation was built from.
Everyone in the meeting is given access to the shared outline, which contains the presentation, the ideas that created the presentation, and the notes and ideas from the meeting itself.
The outline gets refined a bit over the next few days, as ideas settle down, and actions are made, and then the whole thing gets published as a 'public' outline to the company network.
The core 5 minute micropresentation has acted as the catalyst and hub for a structured set of communal ideas, shared and stored in a meaningful way through a shared outline.
Jump forward six months. An employee, accesses the public outline. They fire up the micropresentation (a self playing pps file), getting a five minute overview.
Moving into the rest of the outline, they can quickly review the ideas and notes from the meeting, and to get more insight, review the full outline used to create the micropresentation itself.Organisations get to keep meetings and the presentations (they love 'em!), but by opening up and connecting the thinking process before during and after the event of a presentation, a huge amount of extra value is released from the 'intellectual capital' of the presentation's lifecycle .
If this sounds like something you'd like to see in your organisation, I'd love to hear from you.
A fairly lightweight, but fast read - MIT Sloan's article outlines 10 rules for creating successful virtual teams.
I've worked in virtual teams across several continents, and I think these rules are pretty solid - no guarantee that you'll create or work in a jelled team, but worth reviewing, regardless.
I particularly like no.6:
"6. Create an online site where a team can collaborate, exchange ideas and inspire one another. Strong virtual teams often have a shared online workspace that all members can access 24 hours a day. This space can include the ability to see one another's work, a shared piece of work—like a new product design, or a creative proposal..."
I think a shared ThinkFold outline fits that description rather neatly - sharing a design document by taking charge of different nodes and then collaborating together in realtime during the timezone windows that bring the team online at the same time.
