Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, launched an ambitious new software product called Groove today.
There is some software to download. But what is it? Here are some attempts to describe it:
“a platform for development of tools you can use in a collaborative fashion across the Internet, like chat, or a discussion group”
Dave Winer“Groove enables groups of collaborators to form in a decentralized, ad-hoc, administrator-less fashion… group members interact in highly-secure shared spaces… all the documents, messages, and applications (“tools”) related to a group activity is available for online or offline use… activities like shared editing in real time.”
from Jon Udell’s interview with Ray Ozzie
My first impressions: end-users don’t really have what they need to feel comfortable, yet. It’s too big, there is too much functionality and it feels unfamiliar.
But Groove appears to be very strong when it comes to things like security, user management, replication – and if other developers can leverage that, this just might be a platform that will take off.
I am thinking hard about infrastructure for shared editing right now – it seems to be a recurring theme for my customers.
But the first thing I want is a smooth way to share my own outlines with partners and customers. It’s important to “eat your own dogfood”.
What I don’t want is to maintain a mess of folders and filenames on lots of machines and manually edit all kinds of user access. Radio Userland has interesting concepts, like upstreaming and editorial outlines. But will that be enough? I’ll find out soon.
Could Groove work with Radio Userland outlines? Dave Winer thinks it’s possible, so I guess we’ll see.