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:

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.