YuuGuu is a little different than the options outlined above, because it allows you to share your screen via instant messenger (IM). It also supports all of the major IM platforms such as Yahoo, MSN, AIM, GTalk and more. It also doesn’t require anyone (you or the people you share your screen with) to download and install anything, which should save lots of time and could avoid many headaches.

When you launch YuuGuu, it looks just like any other universal IM client, with all your friends listed from different services. However, the nice thing about YuuGuu is that you can share your screen with anyone by just clicking their name and selecting the “Show” option.

They will see something like this on their end:

That’s all there is to it. They click the link to view whatever you’re sharing on your desktop. Nothing to download or install and no emails invitations, no special session code to enter and no accounts to create. Just click and share.

This is what you will see on your end. Notice the pause button which lets you freeze the screensharing if you need to step away, or change something on your desktop and don’t want others to see what you’re doing. There’s also a free dial-in phone number for all sessions, with a unique conference code.

You can add other viewers to the session by clicking the “Add” button. The free version allows you to host up to five viewers at a time. You also have unlimited usage with other YuuGuu members, and up to 100 minutes per month with non-YuuGuu members. Every session includes the free telephone conference room. There are a few premium plans to choose from which allow unlimited usage with people outside of YuuGuu as well as support for teams and corporate environments. The free version is a good way to get your feet wet and see how you like it.

There’s also a feature called “Web Share,” which works the same way but it allows you to invite others who are not in your IM contact list. It generates a unique URL for your screen sharing session that anyone can view as long as they have the special PIN code.

Besides being able to conduct telephone conference calls during your online presentations with the dial-in phone number, you can also take advantage of YuuGuu’s Skype integration. This allows you to avoid long distance charges (in most cases) or save a great deal of expense with Skype’s reduced long distance rates.

I like the concept of conducting screen sharing sessions and presentations via IM; it makes the process so much easier. I also like not forcing anyone to download and install software and that you can also invite those that are not on your IM contact list.

I would like to see the option to see your contacts from other platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. I’d also like to see the ability to create groups so that you can quickly launch sessions for a group of people with a single click.

What do you think of using your IM contact list to initiate online presentations? What other tools do you use for sharing your screen?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

Who are you and what do you do?

My name’s Siv Lam, and I work in web marketing for a small web development firm. My main focus is helping female entrepreneurs use the web to their advantage. I love teaching women the nuances of social media and online marketing. I help my clients to manage their web sites and teach them how to use Twitter and Facebook to grow their customer base and businesses. I am on Twitter at @sivlam.

What’s a typical day like for you?

I start off every day by going through emails and RSS feeds in Google Reader to catch up with all my blogs and news. I also go through the various Google Alerts I have set up, and check Twitter and Facebook to make sure I am up to date on all the current events. I then spend the rest of the day following up with my clients over Yuuguu and Skype, and attending meetings.

What gear and software do you use, and why?

I am a big fan of Google Apps. I have helped many clients implement this in their small businesses and they love it; it really streamlines the communication within their organizations. The interface is extremely user-friendly and there are so many tutorials to help new users. I use it myself, too; all of my domains use Google Apps.

Because my work involves interfacing with people from all over the country, I use web conferencing app YuuGuu. This free application allows me to share my screen and show my clients how to use the web sites, and demonstrate the Twitter and Facebook pages I have created for them. I can provide hands-on tutoring sessions, just as if I were sitting there right beside them.

I generally work with my clients using free and simple tools that allow them to manage their online presence and convert that traffic into sales, whether they are selling jewelry, clothes or web applications. I do all of my work with my MacBook Pro, which I carry everywhere.

What’s your favorite web working tip?

Although I have Google Analytics set up on a lot of my clients’ web sites, I tell them to use bit.ly when sharing links over Twitter so that they can instantly see when their links are being clicked on. It’s a simple way to receive immediate feedback and see if they are engaging their users.

If you would like to be profiled on WWD, get in touch with me at simon (at) gigaom (dot) com.

There’s no shortage of web-based applications for authoring and publishing presentations (Google Docs, Slideshare) or screen-sharing (Yuuguu) in real time, but Wolverine has chosen to orient its Black Tonic app around a handful of basic principles that differentiate it from existing services:

• Instant “experience sharing,” synchronizing browsers for all those watching a presentation.
• Placing control in the hands of the presenter alone.
• Stripping back the interface to give prominence to the slides’ content, rather than the app itself.

After signing up, presenters’ accounts are provisioned with a custom subdomain, and they can begin to upload their slides as a series of GIF, JPEG or PNG images. Once uploaded, presenters can invite viewers to their presentation simply by issuing them with the unique URL automatically generated by the application; for example, http://webworkerdaily.blacktonic.com/izu2ar9.

The synchronized presentation sessions — powered by the company’s innovative XS technology — work great and require minimal explanation to viewers; they just click and watch. However, despite my fondness for simplicity in application and service design, the stripped-back, minimalist features of Black Tonic’s suggest a great, albeit unfinished service.

Critically, Black Tonic is missing a mechanism to directly import Keynote or Powerpoint slides, or even batch upload slide images; this raises the barrier to entry for new users. Though the XS-powered synchronization works very well, presentations need an additional medium to provide context — such as a conference call or real-time chat. Providing built-in features to set up, for example, a Skype conference call, though reducing simplicity, would provide value to users and even a route to future revenues.

Less crucially, it’s unclear if the generated URLs are permalinks. If so, should a downloadable collection of slides be available alongside privacy controls? And why not also shorten those URLs by default for further flexibility — http://bt.nc/zu2ar9, for example.

Black Tonic shows great promise and it’s worth experimenting with. I suspect that the creators — David Price and Phillipe Blanc — will be adding features rapidly as they learn how users are responding, so do register and give your feedback!

Tried Back Tonic? Let us know what you think of it below.

Related GigaOM Pro Research:

“Report: The Real-Time Enterprise“

Imran: Could you outline the new features announced in the latest edition of Yuuguu?

Anish: This new edition was all about making it really easy for Skype users to instantly screenshare and collaborate in real time with anyone, on any major IM network, not just Skype.

So our unified instant messaging platform has now been extended to include Skype. This means a Skype user can now chat with colleagues on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk and ICQ, all from one client. You can chat one-on-one, or in groups — even across different IM networks.

On top of that, we allow Skype users to instantly screenshare and collaborate in real time with any of those contacts on any IM network. All it takes is one click, and you can have one or more of your contacts join you in viewing your screen in real time, and even share control of your keyboard and mouse to work together. The really cool thing here is that your contacts have nothing to download or install!

We also added the capability for Skype users to easily host web conferences. So if you want to arrange a session to talk your clients through a pitch or give a training webinar, you can now do that with just one click as well.

Imran: Can you tell us a little about the motivation you had for creating Yuuguu and why it’s a valuable tool for web workers?

Anish: We built Yuuguu to solve our own problem. As a company, we all wanted to work from home, rather than all sit in an office. What we found was that it was very difficult to recreate the ad-hoc interactions that happen naturally when you’re all sitting together — things like tapping your neighbor on the shoulder and asking for help, then huddling around your screen to work something out together. It was this that we set out to recreate over the web. Our vision is to make working together remotely as easy as working side-by-side.

Imran: There are a lot of screensharing products available. What’s unique about Yuuguu?

Anish: The key thing is our focus on instant, ad-hoc interactions between people who are remote from each other. We focus a lot on presence, instant messaging, and on allowing our users to leverage their existing contacts lists for real-time collaboration, without those contacts having to download or install anything. Other services focus more on pre-planned webinar-type sessions, which is a completely different problem to the one that we focus on.

Imran: Other than using your existing buddy lists, is Yuuguu also a replacement for regular IM clients?

Anish: Definitely — we developed the technology around our IM platform to make it easier to use in business environments. So while it is as easy to use as a consumer IM service, Yuuguu is an enterprise-grade IM platform. We are big believers in the importance of unified IM as a way to allow collaboration between teams and across organizations.

Imran: Can you tell us more about the future direction of the product and perhaps even the company?

Anish: You can probably guess from what I’ve been saying that we will be extending the IM and real-time communication services we interact with. We also think that the extension of collaboration onto mobile devices is going to be big, so there are some very cool things we are doing there as well…Watch this space!

Have you tried Yuuguu’s new Skype support? Let us know what you think of it in the comments.

The latest to join the fray is Mikogo, a cross-platform (Windows & OS X) screensharing solution that’s just launched a new Mac edition with a “remote support” feature, which takes the product from a straightforward web conferencing application to a broader service, offering live support and desktop sharing for remote clients and customers.

As well as conferencing and remote support, Mikogo suggest that screensharing is useful for product demonstrations, webcasts and teaching applications. The technology allows for 10 participants in a session, more than enough for all of these scenarios.

Other features include:

• The ability to remotely take control of a user’s mouse and keyboard
• Presentation control can be transferred between participants
• Participants can use customized pointers to draw attention to on-screen elements.
• A PSTN-based voice-conferencing service (like Yuuguu, Mikogo is free to use, but is seeking to monetize through other channels, such as telephony).
• 256-bit encryption between all parties.

The trial edition of the service appears to work well — even between Windows and OS X installations — but, like Yuuguu, the interaction design and user experience could do with some polish. I’m surprised that the simplicity of screensharing demonstrated by the likes of Apple’s iChat isn’t more widely emulated. Mikogo isn’t difficult to use, but it could certainly be clearer and easier with some smart design work.

What screensharing apps do you use and why?

Businesses have been concerned at the potential impact of these changes and, as such, Neil’s guide focuses on five tips to help employers prepare for a potential influx of flexible working applications from employees.

1. Understand the process of application The entire process of review and negotiation can take up to 14 weeks. Employers need to be prepared with transparent processes to tackle each case consistently.
2. Take time to understand your staff and the roles they play Preempt applications by identifying potential candidates early.
3. Trust your staff There’s a mismatch between what web workers think they can achieve and the trust employers place in them to work effectively in remote conditions. Kay-Jones suggests that presence and IM-based tools can act as useful technological measures to help create “remote trust.”
4. Understand the effects on your business Efficiency, morale, reduced absenteeism, retention, loyalty and competitiveness are all potential upsides to proactively encouraging flexible working patterns.
5. Security It’s harder to maintain the security of your data with remote workers. It’s important to take steps to ensure that your business-critical data is secure..

It’s interesting to see that remote working is practically codified in this legislation. The British government sees increased flexibility in working as a means to address social issues. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this thinking extended to environmental issues, too.

What do you think of these changes to UK law?

Earlier today the company rounded out its ‘Yuuguu Inside’ strategy by extending its integration of Google Talk buddies to users from AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo’s instant messaging networks, bringing cross-platform and cross-network support to the company’s ‘Yuuniverse’.

With a reach extending into hundreds of millions now, its easier than ever for users of the service to invite participants to a Yuuguu session, though it remains to be seen if removing previous barriers actually makes a difference in adoption of screensharing over face-to-face meetings.

Regardless, Yuuguu remains a useful free tool for web workers and one that now extends a little further.

UPDATE: Yuuguu CEO Anish Kapoor assures me that a bug in the acceptance of .Mac-based AIM screennames will shortly be resolved.

Around a month ago the company added Linux and Flash clients, but I suggested that this perhaps needed to be enhanced with Yugma-style plugins for existing social networks.

Fortunately, Yuuguu’s been thinking ahead and at this week’s The Future of Web Apps in London, announced that Gmail and Google Talk users will be able to invoke Yuuguu screensharing sessions with existing contacts, rather than those within the Yuuguu client. Coupled with the earlier launch of a Flash-based viewer, this helps to broaden the usefulness of the service as its reach extends beyond previous technical barriers.

Google Talk is available from within a bunch of Google’s services, including Gmail, Google Apps For Your Domain and iGoogle, potentially drawing in many more users to Yuuguu, but also signalling that other IM networks, such as Yahoo, AIM, Skype and MSN might be part of the company’s plans.

Following the quick-start guide, existing users will need to update their Yuuguu client to take advantage of Google Talk integration and will need to enter their Google account details into the client’s preferences.

Once configured, your Google Talk buddies will appear alongside Yuuguu buddies in the client and you can simply click on any combination to invoke a screen-sharing session. Other participants are each messaged a URL which starts Yuuguu’s Flash client in each user’s browser (as illustrated above). It’s a simple and elegant process that appears to work well.

Find out more at the company’s Google Talk information page.

Interestingly, Yuuguu is now stating that it’s beta phase is complete, gaining over 100,000 users and is planning premium versions for release in 2009.

At the Office 2.0 conference, earlier this month, CEO Anish Kapoor launched Linux editions of their software, directly providing supported clients for SUSE, Ubuntu & Fedora. Though the company has a modest user base, providing support to Linux can only help to enhance it’s utility as a collaboration bridge between Linux, Windows and the Mac community, to whom Yuuguu launched it’s product at Macworld earlier this year.

Though, this level of cross-platform support is undoubtedly useful, particularly when initiating web conferencing sessions between users in various technology environments, it looks like the real goal Yuuguu had in mind was to move to a more universally supported web-based client, announced at Web2Expo in New York earlier today.

Though a conference host does need to install either Linux, OSX or Windows client, other participants simply require a Flash-enabled browser, the unique URL for the conference session and a PIN code, issued by the host.

Of course, this means that participants don’t even need to join the service in order to join a conferencing session – unless they in turn wish to broadcast and share their own screens – helping to broaden the reach of the service.

Though the service works just as well in all four of it key environments, I can’t help but think that a Yuuguu plugin for existing social networks and communications applications might make for an interesting future development. With Yuuguu sessions now addressable as URLs, it’s not difficult to imagine Yuuguu links popping up in Facebook applications, Google Calendar requests and perhaps even PR releases for software launches…maybe Yuuguu themselves?