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Why Collaborative Applications

Collaborative applications is a broad term being used to cover the computer applications involved in sharing ideas between people and coordinating the activities of people to achieve goals.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines collaborate as:
1 : to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor

Why collaborate? Simply, people working together can get much more done then people working by themselves. This is the magic that has made civilization work for humanity over tens of thousands of years. Individually we can only get a little bit done, but working together civilization can be built and grown.

Now with the internet, computers and software applications people anywhere in the world can collaborate to share ideas, learn from each other or work together to achieve common goals. With collaborative applications people are making their lives and the world a better place. Critical for achieving collaboration using computers and the internet, is software applications that are easy to use and effective at sharing ideas, getting feedback and coordinating activities.

Some of the forms of collaboration applications:

Push Communications Targeted communications with messages.	Email, Instant Messaging and Chats are all examples of where a person wants to send a specific idea or message to one or more targeted people and typically that recipients want to receive those messages. Here the ideas are typically pushed to the recipients. Except for spam we all are frustrated by. Some example applications are Outlook
One to Many Publishing Broadcasting ideas	Publishing of ideas or positions from a person to a broad audience who may not be known to the author. Examples are web pages, like this site, blogs, newsgroups, forums. Typically here the recipients have to make an explicit action to seek out these ideas. Here the users need to pull the information Examples are: Newsgroups, Web Logging
Targeted sharing Selective sharing ideas in a combination of push and pull	This is a new area of applications that are aimed at pushing ideas and information to a designated group of people who want to receive these ideas or information. Lotus Notes was an early example of this, now Groove is a new generation of this along with a number of other "sharing" applications that are based on a combination of web applications and local client applications. Here the authors know who they are creating the ideas for. Examples are: Groove, SharePoint

With collaborative applications, there are some critical features that need to be there. First, most of the users of these applications are casual users and want to focus on the information or ideas. The users are not willing to take any time to learn to operate a complex applications. As a result, these applications need to just work regardless of a the casual user's indifference and they clearly will not read any manuals. As a result users have adopted a number of relatively easy to use applications where they can quickly find straightforward ways to use them. The web browser, email and instant messaging applications have all evolved a pretty simple and common interface for users to interact with. As a result people are generally finding them effective ways to share ideas and collaborate. The challenge with these is the nature of the collaboration is fairly simple.

Email has been one of the world's transforming collaborative application in the way it made it so easy for people to share information with others and get their feedback. E-mail's great step forward was how it speed up the cycle of sharing and getting feedback compared to early methods of sharing information like paper memos. What once took days is now accomplished in hours.

IM and chatting have speed up the interaction cycle a bit more. With many IM systems you know the person is online or not. With IM you can interact with the other person right away (if they are willing). For me IM is just like the phone. IMs interrupt what you are doing and ask for your immediate response. In fact it seems some people consider it rude if you do not respond to IMs fast enough.

For these two types of collaboration the gain comes from speeding up the interaction process between people.

Some of the other types of applications that are being built, that are really collaborative applications, include,

processing applications like workflow
entertainment - games, music, movies
creative apps such as word processing, graphics, design apps
learning and teaching applications

What is critical about collaborative apps is their value increases as they enable people to share and help each other. Over the coming weeks I will try and share ideas on what is involved with creating collaborative applications and making them successful.