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!

For those of us in Silicon Valley, the race is on to get approval from Apple for its highly-anticipated iPad, which is set to hit the stores on April 3. For those of you lucky enough to have gotten your hands on one of these pre-sale touch screen tablets, you’ll have a number of exciting new apps hitting the press in the coming weeks, each specially designed for the iPad’s unique interface.

We at rrripple have been waiting. As we mentioned in a previous post, our entire user experience was designed to be touch screen ready – so that when devices like the iPad hit stores, we’d be able to provide our members with the best experience.

And while our Web application (and our iPhone app – if you haven’t already, you can download it here!) is designed with a touchscreen interface in mind, our development team has been toiling away to get the official iPad application ready for the big launch. And we’re excited to say, the app is ready, and we’ve submitted it for Apple’s stamp of approval.

We’ll have more updates for you as soon as we get our official approval – but in the meantime, here is a sneak peek of what our app will look like:

Wedding planning can be a major challenge – something I can attest to personally. Modern brides are juggling their careers, social lives, wedding planning duties and domestic responsibilities – often with family and friends spread far around the country or around the globe.

Sharing ideas, photos, videos, and articles with the Mother of the Bride, the Maid of Honor, bridesmaids, and – of course – wedding coordinators, is a must for most ladies, but finding a platform to manage the media and files that go into coordinating the Big Day is difficult. Wedding sites, like TheKnot.com or MyWedding.com offer public sites that allow brides to share stories, details, photo galleries and reservation information with the wedding guests – but aren’t an ideal way to share photos of her top dress choices with a small group of people. Likewise, social networking services offer the same disadvantage – what bride wants all of her wedding guests to see her dress before she walks down the aisle?

Enter rrripple. From sharing with her closest confidantes to posting wedding details – time, date, location, room blocks and important party information with all of her guests – rrripple allows brides (and grooms) to be the power of a multimedia sharing tool in a controlled setting.

Want to share images of potential cakes and floral arrangements, documents with proposed menus and appetizers, or even discuss secret surprises with your wedding coordinator? rrripple lets you do that. Want to share details for bridesmaids’ dresses, shoes and accessories with just your ladies? Set up a bridal party group and sharing is as easy as dragging and dropping photos and files into your designated group. Best of all – your Maid of Honor can create her own group (using rrripple) to plan your surprise bridal shower and bachelorette party with your mother and bridesmaids – and you won’t spoil the surprise.

And for wedding guests – the benefits are just as useful. By building a wedding group on rrripple, the bride and groom are making “virtual introductions” in advance of their special day, and making it easy for their guests to:

• Coordinate airport transportation with other out of town guests arriving at the same time
• Share their stories about the bride and groom, or post photos they have of the couple
• Post their own wedding photos after the event in a private setting where all guests (who may not know each other or be connected on social networking platforms) can enjoy or comment on them, without having them open to the public
• Keep in touch after the event, or post contact information such as phone number or email addresses with requests from the group (e.g., “Did anyone happen to pick up a white iPhone from Table 5? If found, please email [email protected]”)

Perhaps you’ve already started your Knot wedding page, or have created your own, customized Web site to share details with guests. But for planning important details, private communications and media sharing, check out rrripple!

A great number of file sharing sites and applications compete for your attention today, with more creative (and lighter) versions of these being favored by users across different domains.  A quick Google search on the term ‘file sharing’ predictably showcase the traditional peer-to-peer services (like Limewire) and the more integrated apps — which do both backups of your hard drive and sharing (e.g. Box.net).  However, there is yet another model of file sharing — temporary transmission of one (or a few) files.

Temporary transmission of files (whether they be a large PowerPoint, PDF, Word, Excel, etc) has its own niche, and there are some great companies positioned in this realm (e.g. drop.io).  Their strength is in their robust back-end systems, allowing quick upload, processing, previewing and ultimately, downloads of multimedia.

So what’s the bridge between peer-to-peer systems on one hand, and the more robust back-end infrastructure plays?  Perhaps the bridge between both will be a visual user interface that can couple next-generation touch-based user interaction (think capacitive touch screens) with these existing back-end heavy products, to create a more engaging, easy to use and delightful user experience to share files with one another.

Users need the basic features, after all, for  file sharing.  But users are also now heavily nurtured in social media, so visual interfaces must also adapt to these social requirements.  Thoughtful, delightful visual experiences are no longer the realm of just your Apple products (as one clear example) but required more and more across the web — rippling their way across the file sharing space, too.

Tonight, at the Plug and Play center in Sunnyvale, we had the pleasure of sharing our presentation and a bit of our Flex application to a great group of smart, fun and entrepreneurial folks — SilvaFUG.  We enjoyed the opportunity to share our vision of group sharing on LifeFlow™ and appreciated all the feedback, ideas and possibilities that resulted from this group tonight.   Thanks to all who participated, especially Keith Sutton and the panelists.