AquaMinds Weblog

Someone asked me the other day if NoteShare is designed to be a document management system and/or a collaborative editing system.  The short answer is no but it also begs the question about what NoteShare really is.  In short, it's a personal desktop information platform for sharing media-rich, multi-page documents called notebooks.  Whatever information and ideas you want to organize and communicate as notebook pages can be shared with another NoteShare user.  Returning to the question, document management is a particular application approach while collaborative editing is a particular workflow approach but both are built upon shared information concepts.

Sharing your notebooks creates opportunities for new forms of social computing applications.  When you have "more degrees" of freedom, you can be even more creative and dynamic in your communications with others.  On top of this, you add NoteShare's convenience factor of place and location for simplicity.  NoteShare allows you to create an instant place or location for gathering, meeting, sharing and exchanging ideas but without schedules or strings attached (like gaining access to a web server).  Instant sharing opens up new possibilities for bringing people and their ideas together in the moment now or any moment.  And why does this matter?  Because productive, creative work can never be scheduled especially if the team is working from different locations or even on the same campus or office building.

The essence of NoteShare's productivity advantage is that you and other users can edit and change the content of a shared notebook (locally or remotely) as easily as viewing and browsing it.  And best of all, users can be both sharing their notebooks while viewing others' remote notebooks at the same time.  By using NoteShare, there is no need for a central server or a hosted service to enable sharing with another user or group.  From your desktop to their desktop, it's a direct connection.  Or, if you've got a second machine around or a Mac Mini, just leave it running 24x7 for anytime access.

"Bicycles for the Mind"
And this is where the excitement of NoteShare begins because social computing is a collective activity that has no time boundaries, no physical boundaries and no application or workflow boundaries.    Apple's very early vision of personal computing has always resonated with me.  When I worked at Apple in the early days,  the big mantra was the amazing leverage gained by using your own computer.  Owning an Apple computer was like having "a bicycle for the mind" which was a terrific ad campaign featuring Steve Jobs that ran in the early 80's even before Apple brought the Macintosh to market.  Insightful and thought-provoking, this brilliant message connected with the public (and eventually with IBM/Microsoft too).  Back then, nothing seemed more exciting than Steve's vision of personal computing.  He envisioned it then as he does today that personal computing has an almost unlimited potential to amplify human creativity.

Today, we take for granted the vast information resources we have at our fingertips.  But it's still personal computing that matters most.  One person, one computer.  Creativity and genius without boundaries.  As we continue to connect everyone with instant sharing, instant messaging and instant communications (sound/video/voice), social computing becomes the new model for pervasive computing.  With NoteShare, desktop sharing is truly anytime, anywhere.  Social computing is transforming into the new personal computing mantra for groups.  And we truly mean any personal group of two or more users creating, brainstorming, organizing, communicating and sharing notebooks.  What could be more social than a bicycle built for two?