Two new (to me, at least) platforms have come to my attention lately, though I can't yet evaluate them from actual use under fire. One is Dimdim - not (IMHO) the most confidence-inspiring name, but since all the good names are owned by scammers, this is what you're often left with. Dimdim is a live meeting space, a collaborative online space comparable to Webex, but free-free-free and totally Web-based. It supports VoIP, shared desktop, video conferencing, slides - all the standard Web conferencing capabilities. Their goal is to make such services affordable for all groups.
Then there's Thinkature, mentioned in a tweet by Howard Rheingold, which seems to offer more of a whiteboard approach in combination with VoIP chat. Now that could be fun. I'll have to run both of these past some other friends in the online social biz.
In essence, they both Dimdim and Thinkature sound good and address real needs, though I still find myself wondering if we'll ever reach the point where we just settle for devoting our creative energies to using imperfect tools to solve the IMPORTANT PROBLEMS FACING THE WORLD. Perhaps you've heard about them.
Many very capable and creative minds seem always to be engaged in tweaking existing tools to deliver that incremental improvement in performance that will cause gobs of users to drop their old platforms in favor of new platforms. It's a culture of creeping improvement, not revolutionary improvement. It attracts VC money and leads to what must be a vast junkyard of abandoned digital interfaces that never really achieved lift-off, or that lifted off just long enough to get attention, then disappeared from the radar.
What if half of the developers working on the next great social widget worked instead on ideas for carbon sequestration or more accurate local climate forecasting? Would we miss them for lack of a better Twitter? I really wonder.
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