Web Worker Daily

As a former designer who still dabbles in the odd piece of commercial or hobbyist work, I’m sometimes stuck at the inception of a project, trying to discover the initial creative sparks that ignite a design, for those fragments of inspiration that set out the path from a blank Photoshop document to a living design.

Nine years ago as an interactive designer in a multimedia agency, designers would post various items we liked -magazine clippings, flyers, business cards, websites - onto a physical noticeboard that we could glance up at for inspiration. Over time, this grew organically into a wonderful design resource for the studio.

These days, my equivalent is a folder on my MacBook desktop called ‘Design Bin’ - I screenshot or scan a design I think might be inspirational in future and dump it in my design bin. However simple, this resource is growing in volume but diminishing in context - and in a connected era - is strangely unsociable.

Enter Scrnshots, a web-based service that lets designers share their inspirations by posting screenshots of interesting designs to a Flickr-esque web site.

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With an increasing dependence on distributed software, and web-based applications the portability of personal and corporate data is becoming an increasingly important issue for all users, but more so for web workers in particular.

Open Data philosophies have begun to coalesce around essays such as the speculative Data Bill Of Rights and the emerging Data Portability movement, web-based services that support portability are still quite rare and invariably the exception to the rule.

Services such as Flickr, del.icio.us and Gmail do allow data extraction of sorts; indeed Gmail’s support for IMAP was apparently motivated by the desire for data portability and enabling users freely import and export messages. Conversely, Microsoft announced that it would end offline Outlook support for Hotmail, effectively imprisoning user’s messages inside Microsoft services, without even a paid for option for IMAP or POP access.

Technicalities aside - portability is really about ethics and ownership. In an marketplace where users are directly contributing assets to the success of a service, we need to be able to assert ownership over those contributions and demand mechanisms to support that ownership.

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Grou.ps, aims to be a catch-all for teams seeking collaboration.  This Swiss army tool of a collaborative site includes ‘Modules’ that enable various degrees of functionality, based on your teams’ needs.  Grou.ps currently offers:

• chat
• blogs
• wikis
• mailing lists + forums
• photo albums
• links (centralized bookmarks)
• maps
• subgroups
• personal profiles
• calendaring

Grou.ps has smartly offered these tools in such a way to capitalize on your existing assets on the web.  That is, your list of links can be based off links already existent on del.icio.us, your photo gallery can be made up of pictures from Flickr, log entries can come from an exisitng blog on the web, and finally, collaborative member’s updates can come from Twitter, if they wish.

These modules exist on an attractive webpage that contain your own template, absent of any branding.  Modules can be customized through extensive preference options.  No ads or branding exist on the site, including the emails that are sent out from the service to users.  Want to access your Grou.ps site on your mobile phone?  No problem - just surf to your site’s mobile address.

Grou.ps’ main advantage to collaboration is they allow you to leverage assets your team already has established on the Internet.  Similar to Tumlr, this means you don’t have pictures, links, and other assets existing in multiple places, minimizing maintenance.