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Jybe plugin - cobrowsing/collaboration

Secrecy is such a pain in the ass; it requires a longer attention span that I typically have the luxury of supporting. A couple weeks ago, I was invited into a private beta of a cool product, at which time I really wanted to blog about it but couldn’t. Since it’s been public, it’s been an entry on my to-do list that keeps getting trumped by bigger, longer issues. But this is easy, so I’ll just do it now.

This new thing is called Jybe - which is a co-browsing plugin for Firefox and IE. It’s distributed by a Houston startup with tech that came out of Rice University Advanced Reality. I met Brian Hoogendam, its CEO, at Gartner’s big, expensive fall love in, Symposium/Xpo in Sun’s Java session (giving full credit for his scrappyness, he said he actually snuck in - wish I did that, I’d still have travel budget left!). He asked some really provocative questions about how they, as a venture-backed startup, could leverage the viral nature of open source while still being true to the profit motive implicit in their receipt of investment (that’s a hell of a paraphrasing), which piqued my interest. They’ve developed a real-time collaboration technology that was aimed at the Microsoft Office apps, but which didn’t seem to have much exit besides acquisition by Microsoft, so they were wisely looking at other options. So these guys had some cool tech with a limited market in their inital area, and they were looking to recalibrate - this is just the sort of story I like.

And I’m really impressed with what they came up with. It’s very cool, letting you easily collaborate with someone by looking at the same thing at the same time, with a parallel chat window. It’s also set up to enable free web conferencing, just upload your presentation to the net (they have space if you don’t have a server out there), and take them through it.

Before you click away, thinking it might not work under your platform, know that it does work under Win, Mac and Linux (even if the requirements section is still confusingly worded).

I use it with Moz and there are some issues with tabbed browsing (which they’re working on). If they get this so that it stays on one tab, I would start a session and keep it open, and share it with my friends. It would be very fun to have a shifting window of links, so that when I cruised by I would see a page that my friends suggest.

This is getting back to the idea of serendipity that Steve Gillmor was discussing at our EBIG SIG last week (blogged here). This is the kind of serendipitythat would appeal to me - incorporate some of the push element back into the mostly pull model of the net. I probably should want to click on more of the links that are presented to me, shared over IM or email or in a blogpost (without context), for if my friends suggest it, it’s probably worthwhile. But often I don’t, simply because there is no context. That’s the model where I’d like to just serendipitously happen upon it open in my browser.

I think there are a lot of places this could be used - especially in the world of shared workspaces like wikis. I have a friend who was working on a wiki startup and they were trying to code in simultaneous collaborative editing (instant WYSIWYG) and that was hard; including this tool in your wiki tool, or just encouraging users to download it, would solve that problem in a cheap and dirty way.

There were other ideas I had, but that’s probably what kept me from posting this - so I’ll just stop. Try the tool yourselves, and let me know what the applications are. Email or aim/jabber me with your session and let’s check it out. I could imagine this being a base for a shared (though somewhat protected) serendipity engine.