People have been talking about “social software”being good and groupware being bad. Sure, I want to share my address book and calendars. You want a genuinely funny story, unlike JWZ’s unfunny story of Netscape’s death (Ok, ok, I get it, it was a horrible tragedy, and as a result you became very rich and have to run a nightclub, and the world has to use Mozilla Firefox for free instead of paying for Netscape Navigator Gold 12) and why business users shouldn’t be your target customers?
In the original Evolution manual I wrote about how you could share calendars and address books, deciding which ones were shared and which ones weren’t. On an individual item basis, even. It seemed like the sort of thing that would be useful: if I’m JWZ’s 22-year-old college kid, or my target customer of a 35-year-old middle-manager, I need to keep track of some things privately and some things in public.
Of course, Evolution couldn’t do that– it barely ran at that point. But also, it wasn’t in the list of things it was planned to do. I tried to convince the developers that if I got to the manual before they got to the functionality, they had to code it the way I had described it. That didn’t work. Evolution was just a client app and we didn’t have a server to host that data and control access to it. Nowadays there is the opportunity to really do all the things I imagined Evolution would be able to do. What do I want it to do?
For address books: I need to have an address book of everyone in my CS class or marketing team or study group or book club, one that I can share with just the CS class or marketing team or study group. (The CS class one should be run by the prof, obviously, the others should be run collaboratively by anyone who joins). I need to have access to the whole school or company’s directory so I can look up random people I need to talk to, but we already have that.
For calendars: I need to keep track of public events that I may or may not be involved in (Red Sox games), personal events that only I am involved in (my work or study schedule), and — here’s the tricky part — semi-public events like the meetings that only five or ten people are invited to, or the schedule for when I am babysitting or having my baby sat upon.
Basically, I want to share these things with a selective audience. And I want to have different levels of power and privilege assigned to different people. And that at some point requires a server. And it requires people to join. And it requires giving up some of the cool.
JWZ’s argument is that something can be made to work, but people won’t love it unless it’s cool. Mine is that something can be made cool, but people won’t pay for it unless it works — and works in a way that nothing else does. Ideally it’s both, and I think there’s room for both coolness and functionality in Hula. Go Hula.
Secretly Ironic 