Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

A browser crash has killed my first attempt to write this entry, perhaps just to make me write a more dramatic first sentence. My prediction is that 2008 will be marked by collaboration convergence, this means

• tightening and deepening the connections between collaborative applications and related fields like social networking, content management systems, enterprise resource planning systems, business intelligence solutions, business process management and so on.
• blurring of borders of individual collaboration tools like digital asset management systems and wikis, wikis and blogs, blogs and forums, forums and mailing lists, mailing lists and chat, chat and instant messaging, instant messaging and twitter, twitter and time tracking, time tracking and task management, task management and workflow management, workflow management and document tracking, document tracking and document sharing, document sharing and digital asset management
• deeper integration of web-based collaboration software and desktop-bound productivity software. Right now, some people equate web-based productivity software that allows a degree of content sharing with collaboration software, but this will change.

Signs of this integration are:

• EditGrid's plugin for Microsoft Excel that allows users to edit spreadsheets on the web in EditGrid that are automatically pushed to the opened Excel window combining power of desktop tools and ubiquity of web-based tools, both to collaborate.
• Google's integration of desktop widgets that come with Google Desktop Search and iGoogle, allowing your personal web-page to embed real-time information of your hardware state.
• Mozilla's WebRunner that allows you to install web-applications like GMail or Google Reader as standalone desktop applications (via Marcel Weiss)
• Blogbridge, the feed reader as an example of desktop software that is truly web-aware.
• Apple's .Mac, back from hibernation combines desktop remote-control, a virtual hard drive, a photo gallery, and a web/IMAP mailer that is tightly integrated with the desktop operating system

Many people have been criticizing Apple's strategy of tight coupling of iLife to .Mac, but this coupling - publishing photos right from the desktop application (iPhoto) to the web and re-aggregating photos back in the desktop application is a good example of the future of convergence.

I wrote about the potential of metadata on the desktop before (A taggable web, a taggable desktop, a taggable workspace and it is good to see the progress of the Tracker project which adds rich metadata facility to the Gnome desktop.

• Jamie McCracken: A Metadata Enabled Gnome
• John Stowers: A Metadata Enabled GNOME

The concept of tagging is not new (in the old times it was called keywords), but with web applications like del.icio.us (which I use regularly), Technorati or flickr, using tags or keywords as lightweight metadata has become popular again. The nice thing about tagging is that it allows you to categorize data according to more than one criteria, opposed to strictly hierarchical organization schemes like folder hierarchies or taxonomies. What is new about tagging in Web 2.0 applications? First, there is the concept of folksonomies which helps uses finding the best tags based on tags assigned to an item by other users. But the most important improvements are new user interfaces that make tagging very easy by adding type-ahead suggestions, browser extensions and bookmarklets and tag clouds that make tagging an web item just a matter of klicking the bookmarklet, klicking some suggested tags and hitting return.

The exciting news is that tagging is slowly moving from the web to the desktop. Desktop innovation happens at slower pace than web innovation, mostly due to the fact that there are much longer release cycles, but some applications like leaftag for the Gnome desktop (screenshots, video), the Quicksilver tagging module for Mac OS X (described by Livehacker as 'Metadata as a filing system') and some interesting fake screenshots of a tagging feature for Mac OS X Leopard, which look very good show the direction of development. All modern filesystems support metadata as file attributes. It is now up to the desktop developers to implement tagging interfaces for this new kind of lightweight metadata.

If we take a look ahead we will see in some years metadata-enabled desktops, metadata-enabled websites and tagging an accepted orgainizational principle. What we should be looking for is a metadat-enabled workspace environment that takes up the opportunities of tagging and lightweight metadata and support sharing of this metadata to be able to organize the data of collaborative workspaces, knowledgespaces, taskspaces and conversationspaces. An example of a tagging-centric organization of conversationspaces is vennt, an online forum software I discussed before.