rrripple blog - private, meaningful sharing

I can admit it now…I was a bit skeptical of the utility of our Activity Stream.  I have such disdain for the Newsfeed way of life, getting glued to a non-stop output of random information and thoughts from random “friends” on Facebook.  I twitch just thinking about the time I’ve wasted.

Once our Activity Stream was live on our iPhone and iPad’s (and now live on web app!) I realized how totally helpful the AS is.  It’s great, do to the fact that the groups that are being summarized by the Activity Stream are all comprised of people I care about, that I created and belong to, that I want to know what is being shared within the groups, real time.

A teacher told me the same thing. She said: “I can assign homework to class, and as I’m running errands in the afternoon, I can find when all of my pupils have submitted their homework, and then I can sit down and review them all at once.”

So the Activity Stream summarizes (top-to-bottom flow) all of the relevant information, and all of the relevant activities of all of my relevant groups.  Especially while I’m on the run, I can check today’s activities, I’m always current.  Therefore, I get 100% of my relevant Signal (conent) and 0% noise.

Finally, mobile sharing that works for me, Yeah!

Happy New Year from the rrripple team!

As 2009 comes to a close, our team has been taking a look back at all of the challenges and triumphs we faced this year – including the launch of our exciting new Web application and our iPhone app – which has made sharing of files and digital media safe and secure, the bumps in the road as we’ve continued to improve on our Beta product, and the tremendously positive feedback we’ve received from the press and from our earliest members.

As you make your New Year’s resolutions, we’ve been hard at work setting our own company goals for 2010. Among them, our three main goals for the coming year include:

1. Continuing to grow our user base by providing the best, most delightful user experience to privately share your life’s media with your real world groups of friends and family.
2. Extending our visual architecture to third parties (and continuing to integrate with them) to allow others to benefit from our core user interface for all their file-sharing needs
3. Introducing highly-demanded features: public groups (yep, they’re coming soon), profile pages, and premium services, as well as a Facebook application and additional mobile apps for Palm, Android, and others.

Helping You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

While we work on improving our product for your use, we’ve also been thinking about how rrripple can help you meet your resolutions.

Our secure, private sharing capabilities make it simple for you to share your photos, videos, and files with those people who matter most to you – and not the anonymous masses on the Web – regardless of your contacts’ level of computer literacy. What does that mean for you? You can finally share those wedding photos from last Fall’s event with your wedding guests, or keep up with your resolution to send your parents more photos of their grandchildren – without sending large emails or using complicated sharing tools.

rrripple’s ability to store and share business files in the cloud will make it possible for you to get your professional documents – from Powerpoint sales presentations to spreadsheets and briefings – organized and online, where they can be accessed anywhere, from any computer – without risking the security of those documents.

rrripple’s iPhone app will help you privately post and share all of those photos that you’ve been meaning to sync to your computer, but haven’t had time to – perfect for protecting the hundreds or thousands of mobile photos you’ve been snapping in 2009 that are one drop of a phone from disappearing!

This Week

You may have noticed some changes to the rrripple interface, and some improvements in our performance (read: lots of bugs have been fixed). To wrap up the New Year, the team has released the latest iteration of rrripple, which comes complete with a completely revamped new Post user interface:

• Separated media tabs
• Multiple sharing capabilities let you select as many different groups and as many individual friends you wish to share with
• Facebook importing allows you to import/open your FB photos directly inside rrripple to share with your friends
• Video uploading!
• Thumbnail previews allow you to add tags, titles and descriptions to one or all of your uploaded media.

We’ve also fixed a number of bugs in our system, and made some adjustments to improve performance look and feel on our site.

Wishing You The Best in 2010

While we’ve been hard at work providing you with the best product possible, we realize that we owe a great debt of gratitude to our first adopters, who have entrusted us with their private media, provided invaluable feedback and suggestions for rrripple, and, without whom, we wouldn’t be the network we are today!

On behalf of the rrripple team, we wish you a happy, healthy 2010!

May it be a great one.

On Saturday morning, we received an email from Apple announcing the acceptance of our free iphone application!  With the rrripple iphone app, you can pretty much do everything you would normally do on the web (including creating a new group, joining a group, posting photos, links and notes, and more).  This app really frees you to view and share just-in-time moments, privately, with the groups in your life.  For instance: you’re at a family event, you launch the rrripple app, select ‘family’ and start taking photos — within seconds, not only have those photos been uploaded directly to the ‘family’ group, but all group members (no matter how large the group) have been immediately notified that new photos have been added to the group!  It’s really that easy, and what’s more, group members can see (and download) high-resolution photos from their home computer to keep photos they like the most.  We hope you enjoy our free iphone application! Please help us improve it by sending us feedback, available from the ‘Settings’ icon on the lower right of the application.

We do a lot of thinking around groups and privacy. After all, we’ve built rrripple to address the importance of having control over what we share, and with whom.   To us, groups are at the core of our company — the bread and butter of our enterprise.  In regards to privacy: well, I think you’ll agree we’ve all been hearing about the importance of having (and keeping) control of what we share, and with whom.  The scenario of finding your shared thoughts, personal photos and other media files appearing in other social circles, networks or even countries is disconcerting, if not terrifying.  Yet, the technology to support secure, private sharing to discreet contacts is available.  Email for example, handles this well for those in your address book.  But step outside just one circle out, and you find yourself wading in an ocean of hyper social titanics, all vying to socialize your media.  We believe there is a middle ground between enjoying a large social gulfstream and a more personal, manageable sharing experience with those closes to you — and those perhaps just a circle or two outside your own little solar galaxy.

Has a shift toward private group sharing begun? We think so.  A lot of effort is being thrown at privatizing (through Privacy Settings) different networks across the net; a struggle to control the monster often created (sometime even inadvertently).  We also see the introduction of Google Wave, trying to control real-time ‘conversations’ and notice that several online backup (storage) companies are reversing themselves out to the sharing world by offering ’sharing’ features of your personal storage media. So, on the polar North, we have the largest networks trying to control their ‘hyper socialitis’, while on the other pole in the deep South, we have smaller networks adding incremental sharing features.  Possibly, we’re all aiming for the better, more manageable and digestible equator.  Or maybe just trying to fly past it.