5 posts tagged “chat and e-mail”

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Gmail is great for many reasons, but one of them is the built-in power search tool. It's constantly indexing your e-mails to makes them easy to parse through on a later date.

My colleague and how-to guru, Dennis O'Reilly, of CNET's Worker's Edge has a few tips for people who want to speed up the way they search for old e-mails as their in-boxes continue to grow and fill up with messages. His tips involve using good old-fashioned operators, the little shortcuts you can put in front of a query to flavor your results.

You can read his post here, or check out the full listing of operators here.

Twiddla takes home SXSW award despite sluggish performance

Collaborative whiteboarding applications can be handy tools for small groups looking to do some brainstorming despite geographical displacement. Meet Twiddla, a free tool that lets you mark up media and live Web sites, or simply organize ideas together on a virtual whiteboard. It also tacks on live communication with text chat and free VoIP conference calling that doesn't require additional plug-ins or software.

The application won an award for technical achievement at last night's SXSW Interactive Web Awards. While technologically fantastic, in my testing I ran up against some noticeable speed and local resource problems. At times I found the application to be nearly unusable despite its simple interface and snappy menus. At other times it was incredibly responsive.

In any case, Twiddla's packing a lot of features that might attract users of premium paid collaborative services such as ConceptShare and Octopz who are seeking a very simple way to get feedback on Web design or photography. It could also easily replace WebEx for a large number of people who use the tool simply for its text chat and shared work space.

One of Twiddla's killer applications is the built-in screenshot tool. It will snap the current iteration of the whiteboard and save it into both your saved media folder and the meeting's history archive. For photo or Web design consulting, this gives you the option of coming back to a work space and editing content asynchronously.

I'm holding off on giving Twiddla a thumbs up for the time being. It simply didn't perform as well as I think it should to make me ditch some of the alternatives. However, I'm happy to see some little guys come up and show WebEx and others like the recently Google-acquired Marratech what can be done on the user interface side to make these tools simple and attractive.

Read Web pages at the same time with others, and make live markups to a site on the fly. You can also chat live with others either via text or VoIP conference calling.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Let's get this out of the way before I go any further. Poodz is a terrible name for a start-up, but I'm willing to give the founders a break since the more understandable Podz.com is parked, and the developers are French--so maybe there's something lost in translation. The default brown on brown color scheme however might be in poor taste.

The service is best described as a Twitter that adds photos, videos, and sound clips. This can be managed over the web or on your mobile phone. Any combination of content can be sent via MMS, which includes whatever videos or photos you've captured on your mobile device. The entire operation is similar to Pownce, in throwing mixed media sharing together into one big pool and seeing what happens.

While the site is entirely in French, once you've registered you can swap back and forth between French and English localizations; however, users of both languages are kept in the same pool, which can result to some trips to Google Translate or simply ignoring responses or messages you don't understand.

Poodz lets you pick what type of content you want to microblog. In this case it's video.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Poodz does a few things better than the competition. For one, it's got tags and a robust search engine. While the search engine is limited to users and channels (more on those later), the tags are really well implemented and let you dig through posts you've made quickly and easily. It's also very good about separating your post types, by placing little photo, video, text, and audio icons to the left of each of your post. Each of these also constitutes a specific RSS feed, so if you felt like only subscribing to a friend's video feed, you could skip the other message types entirely. You can also take any audio or video recorded on the site and embed it elsewhere. Twitter-a-holics can even plugin their login and cross-post messages to the service every time they tweet.

The other key differentiator is the integrated social discussion network called channels. It's the equivalent of e-mail newsgroups, but it uses the same system as the content posting, letting members post whatever they want as long as it has to do with the channel theme. Each channel can have casual observers, or full on moderators who get to treat the channel content like posts on their own accounts--editing and deleting at their discretion. It's an interesting concept, and something that's been a requested feature from Twitter users for a long time now.

So is Poodz worth ditching Twitter, Pownce, et al to join? While more feature rich, and customizable, the crux of these services is all about the community and where your friends are. It's an unfortunate truth that nearly all of these services face a similar battle for user attention that any other new social network has when launching in a world of giants like MySpace and Facebook. However, if Orkut's taught us anything, your service can be hot in a few specific parts of the world and do just fine.

Related: Seesmic, Utterz, and EyeJot.

Poodz shares a lot in common with other microblogging services with the exception that it lets you share audio, video, and picture files, as well as interact with others in groups both public and private.

(Credit: CNET Networks)