Waves of Wave Clones? (Collaborative Thinking)

July 16, 2009

Waves of Wave Clones?

I wonder if we will see a series of vendors tilting existing or delivering new products that mimic Google Wavel...

Shareflow shows the future of group communication — and it’s not email | VentureBeat

However, a rash of recent innovation is starting to challenge email as the predominant form of work-flow communication.
Zenbe, a New York City-based startup, is the latest example. The company today has released something called Shareflow. Shareflow is essentially a web-based dashboard that lets you see the flow of communication around a given topic (see image below). In many ways, Shareflow is like Google’s Wave product, released in late May. In each case, the page becomes a stream of things posted about the topic, with the most recent item posted at the top, and the previous posts moving down the page. However, Shareflow takes a step further than Wave by letting you incorporate your regular email into the flow. More on that in a sec.

Basically, both Shareflow and Google Wave are different from email in that they let you post text comments, but also other attachments, such as charts or files. A flow can have as many participants as you want. It can include two people, or the entire company, and include people external to your company too. But each flow remains focused on a particular topic.