Thursday, March 01, 2007

Online collaboration: skrbl, nice online whiteboard

 If you've read this blog for any length of time you know that I have a thing for tools that let people collaborate at a distance.  Maybe that's because I'm frequently far away from the people with whom I want to collaborate!

Skrbl is a very nice online whiteboard that can be created almost instantly.  In their words:

The complete web whiteboard. Just start skrbl, give out your URL and instantly share online.  Use skrbl to collaborate with others or, keep it your own private web space. Write notes, sketch drawings, upload pictures, share files...
Everyone sees the same screen,
Everybody stays on the same page.

It really is about that easy to use.  In about twenty seconds after launching the web site I was doodling on the whiteboard.

You can write with a mouse or with text.  You can insert graphics and communicate very complex information very simply.  As a tablet use I love inking right on the screen.

  You can use this for your self, as an online bulletin board or more valuably, invite others to participate in an online brainstorming session.

Registered users (free) can add people to the session either by sending them an invitation email from within skrbl or by IMing them the URL for the session. Either way it's about as simple as it gets.

On the DOWNSIDE, I sent a link to a friend who was on a 3 meg broadband connection and after about 15 minutes, he still hadn't seen anything drawn on the screen.  Whooops.

Skrbl is still in beta but watch out for this little app.  It's got a lot to offer.

via Lifehacker

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice pick. I tried it out with others in the office it 'Wowed' the heck out of them. At one time there were 10 of us drawing on the same page when we shoulda been working. The one Mac user had a problem when she opened skrbl in Safari, turns out they only support IE & Firefox.

Jeff said...

Great! Thanks for stopping by and leaving your comment. The guy I was trying it with was on a Mac, but using Firefox. Maybe that was the problem.

Thanks again for the comment.