Friday, March 14, 2008

Twiddla ... collaboration without signup

Sometimes I find the need to get a friend to see what I'm doing, or show them a section on a website, or guide through purchasing a product, and it would be nice if we could see the same screen and go through the steps. 
Here's the problem I always see: any solution that may be possible usually requires a lengthy signup, email confirmation, and the works. Of course, there's sites like... http://www.bugmenot.com which removes the pain from some of these processes, but it's still a lot of setup instructions. 
Well yesterday, when I was stumbling around, I found a pretty cool site, which is, still in public beta (meaning, still has its quirks) ... but is promising. The best part about this one, is that no signup is required, you can go to it, start a session, as an anonymous user, and invite as many other users into it to share the session. The result is just a url that takes the user straight to the session. Granted, this session is public, so anyone may join it if they know the URL. If privacy is required, you would have to sign up for an account, and create a private session. 
Here's one issue that I didn't like, though I certainly understand:
  • You can only share sites that are outside of an authentication realm. I tried to login to gmail, or my bank account, and non of them worked. Which is ok I guess, but just something I noticed. 
  • For obvious reasons, you cannot guide someone through an intranet site (company website, etc ...) because the connections are actually made from the twiddla servers to the site, therefore not giving them access to your intranet. 
This is a fairly obvious point, but given the benefit of such a site, I could see people wanting to use it for intranet, and authenticated session. 
Overall, Twiddla is a pretty cool site. I would just give it some more time before they have some of their tools within the whiteboard working correctly. 

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