Finally: Facebook Co-Founder Opens the Curtain on Two-Year Old Asana
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
"I won’t belabor the features and screen shots here. Hear the pitch from the founders yourself."
...Oh.
The author could have added a lot more value by actually describing the product and its differentiating characteristics.
(edit: Ohhh! Is it uncharitable to assume she couldn't sit through the video either? Maybe she doesn't know yet.)
Instead, the post waxed philosophical, at great length, about a bunch of things tangential and ultimately irrelevant to what the hell it is they've actually made. It's left as an exercise to the reader to slog through a loose, one hour video to figure out why this matters.
I don't mean to be a grumpy gus, but how do people get paid to do such sloppy, self-indulgent work?
Anyone have a tl;dr on the magic and rainbows delivered by Asana? (Hunch/spoiler: Basecamp plus complexity, splitviews, more AJAX, a non-2004 design)
Free enterprise services that aim to do everything seems to be the general idea.
A talking point would be the period between angel funding (Apr 09) and testing the first incarnation with the first beta customer (Jun 10), especially when the team appear to have very little experience of the arcane business processes and technological incompetence of the average enterprise. Using Facebook Connect as a [temporary] login solution according to their beta signup page sounds like the first inexplicably crazy decision.
On the plus side, the screenshot that replaced the video looks much prettier than most enterprise apps, the team is obviously really smart people and their proprietary webapp scripting language sounds like it could be at least as interesting as the product when it's released into the wild...
The difference is, when someone updates Basecamp, they're updating the team. They're actively trying to communicate and tell other people what's going on. That's work, that's annoying, people don't want to do that, and the info in Basecamp becomes unreliable and prone to be dated.
But if you're updating your personal data, people do that all the time. Just in this case your personal data is also shared across your organization so that other people know what's going on at the same time.
They pair this with good access controls so that larger groups can share data frictionlessly.
This looks like it might be better than basecamp, but I have trouble seeing it really beating out notepad or FreeMind. What I really want is FreeMind for PIM and groupware on one monitor, and on the second monitor structured data about nodes and appended conversations. Having all that on one screen just isn't useable, especially as a web app.
Here's an article that contains more of a product summary: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-cofounder-shows-what...
- It's Google Wave, this time by ex-Facebookers!
- Software that messes with my email sucks.
- It looks complicated.
- People use text files and whiteboards because you can wipe it and start over and draw and connect stuff and use colors and...
- If their plan is to build something sexy and get acquired, they'll probably succeed just because of their Facebook past.
- If their plan is to build a product and live off it, they'll probably pull it off because most other software sucks so bad and is limited.
- But, based on the video, they won't fundamentally "solve" the problem they're attacking, their software will just be another context (like text files, stickies, emails, wikies, bug tracking, etc.)
- Investors always ask at the end of your pitch, "How are you different than X?" and "Why will you succeed where X has failed?". I didn't really see the answer in this video.
- Their virality plan sounds interesting in the context of Enterprise Software.
Hopefully I'm wrong!
At least, that's what I got from fast-forwarding, it's an hour long presentation.
My point is that trying to spread an app aimed at enterprises using a large-scale bottom-up approach seems to be a relatively unexplored approach. I don't know how Yammer is doing, but I have never seen one of my business partners or co-workers use Yammer and thus be exposed to it (=bottom-up).
[1] http://chandlerproject.org/ Looks like they finally made it to a version 1.
How many times have people come up with these super new way to make people collaborate better, only to find that it doesn't work. The last innovation in this field that made any real impact on team collaboration was in the 70's - email.
Facebook is kind of an _anti_-productivity application. Taking the Facebook approach to developing a "live in it" productivity application would be something of a disaster. I've been using using Facebook (fairly lightly, I'll admit) for years and still don't understand its structure. E.g. when I'm told "so and so" has made a comment on my wall or replied to a post or liked something -- I'm not sure where those things are to be found.
In the end, most serious people "live" in their email inbox to some extent or other (modulo some kind of discipline for not checking it too often or whatever) and anything that doesn't wrap around email is essentially a waste of time.
A tool that wrapped around email, [shared] calendar, [shared] to-do-list, [specialized reddit-like forums, and a wiki might have a shot (is this what asana is? I have no clue). This seems like something "easy" for Google or Microsoft to do (since they have pretty compelling email infrastructure) and impossible for anyone who isn't able and willing to do something 80%+ as good as gmail to do.
The idea is basically that complex web 2.0 design patterns (ajax/comet/memcache/sql optimization/etc.) require a lot of tedious effort to build and maintain, and wouldn't it be cool if you could simply define models, views, and handler functions, and then have the framework take care of everything else.
I honestly think that Luna has the potential to change web development the way Rails did (i.e. by making it an order of magnitude easier), and could transform web apps themselves the way G-mail did (i.e. by emphasizing things like really-real time updating via comet the way G-mail initially introduced the world to Ajax).
I have no idea how Luna is architected, but the concept really resonates with me: javascript-based, web 2.0-abstractions that prevent repetitive things I do in Rails like having to redefine some of the same functions in ruby code and javascript code, and then having to manually keep them in sync.
It's so cool that I think I'm going to try to hack together my own, humble Luna knock-off built on top of Node.js, jQuery, and MongoDB (which uses a javascript query language and JSON-but-better (BSON) data models).
There’s that almost hubristic mission: To fix how people work together and make the global work place a better, more efficient, less frustrating place.
I like that.
How did that slip through?
The video is long, but you can get a good grasp of the product in the first few minutes. The rest of the video is in-depth discussion on how they started thinking of how to do it, how they think they will reach the companies and also inner workings on how the software work.
We have some people who are more MVP-leaning, and others who are "let's build the vision"-leaning. For example, Eric Reis is one of our board observers. But we all believe we should't fall back on dogma rather than using judgment and balance, and we think having a symphony of perspectives on the issue is valuable to deriving that balance.
We're committed to validating our hypotheses via customer adoption and metrics, but we're also committed to investing sufficiently in our framework, platform, and product that we can realize the whole of our ambition. Practically speaking, the user feedback right now is very consistent, and we know where we need to go. We absolutely need search, for example. Adding tons more users or doing more rigorous validation would slow us down from getting there. As the path ahead of us gets less clear, we will scale up our userbase and invest more in metrics and validation.
Yes Basecamp and nameless other pieces of software might already do this, but you could argue this is Bugzilla with a nice flashy Ajax interface on top of it... technically I suppose it is, but the Ajax interface is really functional. I would say as impressive as Gmail was to us when it came out -- keyboard short cuts, drag and drop, intelligent email parsing, tagging/grouping/slicing/dicing.
This is like some marriage between Basecamp, Find Bugz and a Customer Support app all married together.
Atlassian might want to pay attention to this, but I think 37 signals is safe from any real competition.
P.S. Justin Rosenstein? Co-founder of Asana?
For a tl;dw, try http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-cofounder-shows-what...
Both of them?
I'm excited.
Facebook (layout/feeds) Twitter (async assign) Intentional Software (multiple representations, same model) Google Wave (live updates, email integration)