Flickr co-founder’s new tool, Slack, seeks to reform workplace conversation

Gigaom

In the world of online workplace conversation, here are plenty of options — in addition to Google Hangouts and individual chat clients like Pidgin or even AOL Instant Messenger, chatrooms aimed at the corporate world like Campfire and Yammer jockey for relevance in office culture. Flickr Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield and his team at Tiny Speck are entering the fray with Slack, a mashup of chatrooms and collaborative sharing tools that are meant to do away with redundant conversations in multiple places.

Slack was born out of a pivot, after Butterfield’s previous project, an MMO entitled Glitch, failed to gain traction.

With the goal in mind to circumvent the slow conversations of email, Slack can be access via desktop or mobile and sorts every message into designated “channels” with hashtags. The app offers both group chat and private messaging as well as integration with a number of productivity apps…

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Read Today: Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

I finished reading this book today.

At the BookShelf

Treasure Island was the first major novel of Robert Louis Stevenson. It was first published in 1883 and has remained a much-loved book. First penned as a story for boys, it was as a young boy that I first came across Treasure Island. It was the first real book that I ever read – certainly of my own choice. If I remember correctly, the copy I had was a small book, not much bigger than my hand and illustrated throughout. The illustrations weren’t coloured as such, but I think I may have started to ‘colour them in’ as I read the story several times. The name of the ship, ‘Hispaniola,’ came back to me in one of my first compositions at school. In that early attempt at writing I wrote a story about piracy and a ship called the Hispaniola. I believe I was written into the story, along…

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Online Video Rotator

From time to time when taking a video you sometimes find it better to shoot the video ‘on its side.’ Of course when this is done the video is only able to be viewed side ways. If only the video could be turned and viewed the correct way up. Online Video Rotator does this job for you, though it is limited to 3MB only. Does anyone know of a place for converting larger files – that would be very useful? Still, having an online tool that does the job even for small files is a great help.

For more, visit:
http://www.rotatevideo.org/

 

wibbitz

Today’s link is wibbitz, which is a video player plugin for your website, that makes your content into an interactive video, which can then be shared on other sites and social networks.

Fore more, visit:
http://wibbitz.com/

FilzMail

Today’s link is to a site that offers a temporary email address which will expire after 24 hours. It is quite a simple service to use and is useful for signing up to a site without getting any Spam and the like.

Fore more, visit:
http://www.filzmail.com/

Diigo

Diigo has been about for some time, but I have only just registered an account. I use Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon and the other bookmarking and surfing web applications/social networks that I have posted about in recent weeks, yet diigo adds another element to my web adventures.

Diigo is a social network sharing site, in that you can share the bookmarks/favorites that you save. But the new element that diigo gives me in my surfing the net is that which I have at hand when I am reading a book or magazine offline – a highlighter and the ability to add notes to the written page (which in diigo is done via a sticky note that is attached to the page you are on). I can then return to the page I am reading with a bookmark as it were attached to where I got up to (by way of a sticky note), highlighted sections that were of particular interest to me and the ability to share what I have added to that page by way of my highlights and sticky notes. It is also possible to take a collaborative approach to this sort of online research by creating a group of users within diigo.

I can see diigo becoming a very important research tool that I will use for many years to come.

Visit diigo at:
http://www.diigo.com

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a social network for web surfing and sharing webpages and sites that you particularly like and find useful. You can easily surf the web by ‘stumbling’ along – that is, by clicking the stumble button on the toolbar that you can install, allowing you to visit random sites in the categories you choose to explore. As you visit sites, you can like/dislike them, allowing StumbleUpon to learn your likes and dislikes as you surf the web via StumbleUpon.

Being a social network, StumbleUpon allows you to share the sites you visit with friends and others within the StumbleUpon community. Of course, StumbleUpon can be used as a bookmarking type of site, by adding the sites you like to StumbleUpon in a similar way to that of adding favorites/bookmarks to Delicious or your browsers favorites/bookmarks. It’s up to you.

I tend to use StumbleUpon as a surfing tool and haven’t really added a lot to my favorites (I generally forget to do that). For this purpose I have adjusted the settings within StumbleUpon to reflect the topics I like to explore while surfing the web. So it isn’t such a sharing tool for me, as a recommendation tool for the various categories I have checked.

See more at:
http://www.stumbleupon.com

FriendShuffle

Friendshuffle is somewhat like StumbleUpon, except Friendshuffle is for following what your friends on Facebook or Twitter have been looking at via their links and likes. It allows you to share in the web surfing activities of your friends, via what they post on either Facebook and/or Twitter. Whereas StumbleUpon learns what you like by what you click on as being liked, FriendShuffle merely adds what you like to your profile, so that you can share it with further friends.

Friendshuffle can be a fun way of entering into what your friends are discovering on the web and then sharing that with others. It is also an easy tool to use. You simply log in with your Twitter/Facebook accounts and you can then start shuffling through what your friends have been looking at.

For more visit FriendShuffle at:
http://www.friendshuffle.com/

I Rate My Day

I Rate My Day is a rather simple daily Blogging type tool. All it is is a simple way to let your friends and family know how your day is going. It is a simple micro-blogging site, with very brief notifications posted as to how the day is going for you. You can also link your ratings to your Facebook profile.

Visit at:
http://www.iratemyday.com/

101in365

It has now been a month since New Year’s Day and perhaps a bit under a month since the New Year’s Resolutions that many sought to undertake fell by the way-side. Now is perhaps the time to have another look at those resolutions (and perhaps others we have thought about and done little with) and plan to do something about them. This is where 101in365 comes in. 101in365 is a web application/social network that provides a tool to assist tn meeting goals – 101 of them in fact, in 365 days.

The first thing you need to do (after registering of course) is come up with a list of 101 things you would like to achieve in a year (365 days). You enter these into your listing of 101 aims/goals. Once this is done you can lock your list in and begin the work required to bring them to past. You are able to update your list by marking each item as in progress and then to mark off each item as it is achieved.

With 101in365, you are able to keep your list of goals private or you can share them with the wider 101in365 community and/or your friends and family. It’s up to you. You are also able to interact with others via both Twitter and Facebbok if you like.

The tool itself is rather simple to you and before you know it you can have it all up and running. It is somewhat more difficult to actually achieve the goals you set yourself. At least this tool is a welcome way to assist in reaching your goals and is certainly able to be used as a means of encouragement and stimulus.

Visit 101in365 at:
http://www.101in365.com/