Thursday, November 9th, 2006
Real-Time Collaboration: ConceptShare and Thinkature
TechCrunch reports on two products in the growing category of real-time collaboration. These products let two or more people create a shared workspace, mark it up, manipulate images, and chat together. Kind of a real-time wiki for a limited set of contributors, and not too different from the sort of collaboration available in Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
Thinkature (which seems to have been TechCrunch’d right now) launched in October and is a pure Ajax app using Comet/HTTP Streaming for real-time synchronization.
Thinkature works best for communicating thought processes visually. You can resize images but you cannot zoom as you can in Conceptshare. The company’s business model wasn’t something they were willing to discuss with me, but they said that they were looking beyond the subscription and storage model. Thinkature’s target users are anyone who appreciates wikis, the company told me. Education and product design are among the different uses they have seen so far.
If you’re looking for a fast and free way to collaborate around a design proccess, Thinkature may serve you well.
ConceptShare is a similar app, due to launch soon, but is apparently Flash-based. Presumably, this means the synchronization is achieved with XML or binary sockets.
Good morning, and greetings from Thinkature.
Embarrassingly, we went down due to a server configuration error rather than excessive load. We were actually handling our crunching just fine. At any rate, we’re back.
…and I’m going back to bed now.
Thanks!
Hi Guys,
Thanks for the mention. I wanted to add a couple of things to the discussion.
ConceptShare has a flash front end with a .NET back end.
We are using flash remoting to communicate with the server. This uses a http protocol, which can easily be secured using SSL (https).
We do plan to implement a XML socket connection for ConceptShare after we have released our API.
I hope that this adds to the conversation.
Again thanks for the mention.
cheers
Scott Brooks
ConceptShare.com
I’ve never heard oif thinkature before but i actually think its a really cool application. Will carry on using it if i can
re: Thinkature
Thinkature.com | the Idea Fuel interview
Today we are pleased to inaugurate a new interview series on the Idea Fuel blog. A few weeks ago, as I was digging in deep on Y Combinator, I mentioned that I thought Thinkature was the coolest of the current crop of Y Combinator companies. Jon Cha…