Thursday, July 18, 2002

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John Burkhardt: Yesterday at Groove Networks our Notes server went offline for a while.  A few people wandered the hallways feeling helpless, while the rest of us revelled in the advantages of a decentralized architecture and kept right on Grooving.

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I've been thinking these last couple of days about Justin's remarks on the Groove transceiver. I understand his points and agree on a lot of his observations of how Groove's technology could and should be used to enrich existing applications without forcing people in a new environment but personally i really like the transceiver. Maybe it's because I’ve grown accustomed to it over the last 1.5 years and learned to live with it's current shortcomings (performance, search, print) but what i really like about the transceiver is that it offers an intuitive user-friendly but very productive environment where new, less tech oriented, users feel at home very quickly. I have been introducing Groove to almost 100 people over the last year and my experience is that users are acclimatized within minutes and can get instantly productive. As a trained Architect (houses etc.) i became more aware of the importance of orientation points, aesthetics and intimacy for people to feel at home in a city, house or even software and in my opinion the Groove transceiver offers all that. It feels a bit like living in a nice old European towncentre. where your shared spaces resemble citysquares strongly embedded in the context of other spaces and people where yo go to discuss different subjects or work with different people. You know most of the people around and everything is within walking distance ;-) btw Groove 2.0 also has the Groove explorer which is a more efficient environment to quickly glance through your spaces (did you try that, Justin ?) but i hardly use it myself probably because I’m so used to the transceiver and feel comfortable in it. However there is allways room for improvement and both the transceiver and the explorer would benefit greatly if they became faster, more snappier. I know Groove Networks realizes this too and are working on a serious performance boost in the upcoming version and with the release of Groove’s edge services it will be possible to extend the benefits of the secured Groovespaces to a wide array of  user interfaces to all sorts of devices.