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Tag: Social

Mural.ly – Visual collaboration in the cloud

Published by admin on May 26, 2013

A lot of collaboration is taking place online in geographically dispersed teams, one common problem for all those collaborators is the lack of having the in-office whiteboard, Mural.ly might be the answer.

Mural.ly visual collaboration and mind-mapping tool

Mural.ly is basically a virtual whiteboard enabling sharing ideas, drawing, images etc. It’s available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and uses HTML 5. We mainly used the Chrome app, which the developers had support from Google to integrate, but there is similar integration for Firefox and other browsers.

Mural.ly contains a number of objects such as sticky notes which can be dragged and dropped anywhere, basic drawing tools, sets of predefined stickers etc. It’s possible to embed images, videos, web content (inserting by entering the URL) and documents.

The collaboration features includes inviting other users to a mural, commenting with reply functionality, a chat and email notifications when other participants update the mural.

Using Mural.ly is a breeze, it’s very easy to get started and pretty soon you realise that there are almost an infinite number of usage areas, such as wireframing, plans, brainstorming, creating designs etc. The app comes with some predefined templates for business plans, 5 whys, lean canvases, empathy maps etc.

There are some limitations in the basic version of Mural.ly. For example in the PRO-version it’s possible to download the murals as images or a .zip-file, sharing secure murals using a password, and organising the creations in different rooms for different teams. However the PRO-version is not that expensive, $100 for a year, or $10 a month.

Overall we really like Mural.ly, it’s a must for smaller dispersed organisations, development projects, designers or for just organising your own personal ideas and projects in a visual way. It’s also a very easy to learn and use tool. A major limitation right now is that Mural.ly is not available for the Ipad, the developers are working on a version, which should be coming soon.

Mural.ly features post-its and a series of different objects Mural.ly let's you drag and drop web content to the workspace

Banjo – Social discovery

Published by admin on April 5, 2013

Banjo is a location based social networking app released in the summer of 2011, and has since then managed to attract 4 million users. It’s available on Google Play and in the App Store, while the app initially was intended for pure mobile devices Banjo recently updated their apps to be usable on Ipad and Android-tablets.

Banjo

So what is Banjo really in practice? Banjo imports posts from most major social networks and then makes it possible to sort them by location. For example if someone not in your network posts a public Facebook post nearby it will show up in Banjo An additional feature is that it’s also possible to select other locations than just nearby, so if you want to see what’s going on in Hong Kong Banjo will do it for you.

As most social networks are built around the notion that you communicate with a network of followers or friends, Banjo extends to discovering completely new connections, which is refreshing. But it’s main selling point in our opinion is the possibility to monitor events such as the Academy Awards or different news events, and see what is being said in various social networks and locations.

However most of the connections discovered in Banjo is not really aware of that they are being discovered using Banjo, which is a stark reminder of the impossibility of flying under the radar in social networks (which of course is contradictory to the whole point with social anyway).

Banjo connects with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Google+.

Banjo friends update Banjo Places Banjo friend in common

Timehop: Your Digital Time Machine

Published by admin on June 10, 2012

All the social media sharing and interaction is creating essentially a historic path online of our lives. It is intriguing that there are few services (except Facebook advertising) who takes advantage of this.

Timehop features Facebook integration.

Timehop was founded in 2011 and is the result of a Foursquare hackaton, the service is backed by several venture capital firms. Every day the service will go back one year ago in your social networks and send a summary via e-mail. It will also import events of somewhat general historic importance from that day, also from social networks.

Timehop can be used with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Instagram. The service can also sift through your text-messages on an Iphone and Android phone. Which may be a little bit too much information to give away to a social networking service.

Overall Timehop is a neat idea with a clear purpose, it is addictive and you will read the e-mails it sends, guaranteed. However it’s probably one of those services that will exist for a while until the big social networking players figure out how to solve it themselves.

Timehop displays your social media activities a year back.

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