Last night we launched a new public web site at www.zenbe.com. We think the new design does a good job conveying that Zenbe is more than just email – we offer multiple products that help you and your team collaborate and be more productive.

Many thanks to Jay, Jeremy, Aaron and Edwin for helping to get the new public site up and running.

We’re also now accepting signups for our new product – Shareflow.  Shareflow is perfect for teams that communicate a lot with each other about specific topics. Examples include departments within a company, freelancers and their clients, project planners and more. We offer a free plan so try it out today and tell us how you like it. I’ll be blogging more about that in the coming days.

Feel free to contact us if you have any questions or issues.

Today Apple took Safari 4 out of Beta and made the official release available for download. We’re excited about this because there has been a longstanding bug in the Safari 4 Beta version that caused Safari to crash when accessing Zenbe products on the web.

The bug was fixed in the Webkit rendering engine a while ago, but it’s finally been patched over to today’s Safari 4 release.

So Safari 4 Beta users: Go to www.apple.com/safari and upgrade today for a great Zenbe experience in Safari 4!

Bloggers: check out a nice post by Brian Casel about how he uses Zenbe Lists to keep track of ideas for his blog.

Keeping Track of Blog Post Ideas with Zenbe Lists

If you’re a blogger, you know how important it is to write down your ideas as soon as they come to you.  If you don’t, you’ll forget them and wish you had them when it comes time to write.  Every good blogger should have a long list of blog post ideas ready to go when they’re needed.

Thanks Brian!

We use email a lot at Zenbe. After all, we built an email platform from scratch about 3 years ago because we felt like it was the right time to take email in a new direction.

However, as a team we found it difficult to be truly productive with email alone. Why? A few reasons:

• Hunt-and-peck syndrome
  Important emails get mixed in with less important emails. Rules, tags, and personal discipline help, but I still have to scan or search more often than I should to find what I need.
• “Oops, I forgot to CC you!”
  I just sent out my latest product proposal to my business partner and product designer. But I forgot to CC the lead engineer. So I forward it to him. But then the product designer replies to the original email and the lead engineer doesn’t get the reply. ARGH! Now everyone’s out of sync and I need to fix it somehow.
• Frequent distractions
  I’m searching for that proposal you sent me two days ago when an email with specials from Amazon.com pops into my inbox. Trying…to…resist. Oh well, I guess finding the proposal can wait.

Sound familiar? Our frustration with issues like those lead us to ask a few questions:

• How do we reduce the amount of mental context-switching people have to do when processing their email? When the first email of the day I read is a marketing proposal, and the second email I read is about hiring, my mind has to leap from one topic to another. This decreases productivity.
• How do we make sure the right people are involved in a conversation? And if we forgot to include someone, how do we make it easy for them to get caught up with what we’re discussing?

We tried a number of different tools to try to solve these problems. Instant messaging, a wiki, an internal blog, and Google Docs are just a few. But that just scattered the information in multiple places.

Our solution is embodied in our new product: Shareflow. Shareflow allows you to have focused conversations with the people that matter.

Instead of emailing individuals or groups, you share email, files, comments, events and more in a “flow”. And then you invite people to the flow where the conversation ensues in a central place.

Any participant can share and comment on things in a flow. But the flow creator decides who gets to be a part of the flow to keep the conversation on topic. People can be added or removed from a flow at any time.

My most important communication with my teammates is now contextualized in the different flows I participate in. When I’m working with a conversation in a flow, I know the right people are seeing the information and we’re not going to be disrupted by an off-topic email.

To make things more concrete, I’ll give you a few examples of how I use Shareflow day-to-day.

The “Team Zenbe” Flow

Who has access?

Everyone who works at Zenbe.

What do we share?

Anything of interest to the entire company. Examples include:

• Documents describing new product or marketing initiatives.
• Links to articles relevant to our industry or products, and internal comments.
• Questions about a feature we’re building, or the timing of a product release.
• Events like company holidays or outings.

What does it look like?

Here’s an actual screenshot. This is just a section of the flow. Content is ordered from most recently updated to least recently updated. In this screenshot you see two tiles. One is an interview with an inspiring entrepreneur that I posted along with my comments. The other tile is a document Peter wrote about Shareflow for the entire team to review. You see people’s comments right below the original posts:

Click image to enlarge

The “Founders” Flow

Who has access?

The four Zenbe co-founders: Alan, Peter, Robert and myself.

What do we share?

Information related to business development and strategy. Examples include:

• Contact information for people we meet and network with.
• Copies of emails (yes – you can send an email directly to a flow!) to or from partners and advisers.
• Documents and proposals we sent or received. On a side note, our inline document viewer makes reading documents right in the browser a breeze, regardless of the original document format.
• Events related to trade shows, demos, or other business meetings.

What does it look like?

I can’t show you! It contains private information. But that’s one of the great things about Shareflow. Only the founders have access to the “Founders” flow. Unlike a typical social network where everyone in the network can see everything, in Shareflow you get to choose who participates in each flow.

Our “Founders” flow allows us to distribute who takes the lead on a certain strategic initiative or relationship but ensures that if that person is unavailable for a call or meeting any of the other founders has enough background info to step in.

The “Zenbe Developers” Flow

Who has access?

All of the developers at Zenbe.

What do we share?

Geeky development stuff mostly. The fancy term for it is “organizational knowledge management.” Examples include:

• Questions and suggestions about our programming conventions and libraries.
• Links to tools and technologies we find interesting.
• Discussions about bug fixes or feature development.

What does it look like?

The screenshot below depicts some recent posts on the Zenbe Developers flow. Will and Jeremy created and shared a ruby script that generates command-line reports from our bug tracking system. We’ve also been discussing the technical details of Google Wave. Will posted a YouTube video which was automatically embedded in the flow.

Click image to enlarge

We have similar Flows for other functional groups at Zenbe, like system operations, user interface design and customer support.

The “Son of Zengeist” Flow

Who has access?

Everyone who works at Zenbe.

What do we share?

“Son of Zengeist” is like our virtual water cooler. It’s where we share stuff that’s not directly relevant to anything in particular, but is interesting or funny.

It’s nice to visit the “Son of Zengeist” flow to take a break every now and then. Here’s a screenshot of how we’ve been entertaining ourselves recently:

Click image to enlarge

How Shareflow and Email Work Together

I still check my email first thing in the morning. We still email each other at Zenbe, mostly for one-on-one conversations. A lot of times I’ll get a useful email from someone and post it to Shareflow. From within Zenbe Mail it’s just two clicks, or if I’m using another email service I can forward the email to a Shareflow-specific address.

Next I check my Shareflow activity. I click “All Flows” to scan the most recent activity across all flows I participate in, or I click on an individual flow to focus on what’s happening there.

Because every flow is built around a context, my distractions are minimized. When I am browsing a flow, I am literally “in the flow.” If that flow is updated I see it right away, but unlike getting a new email the flow update is almost certainly relevant to the topic I’m currently thinking about.

I also no longer have to nag my coworkers so much with questions like “Did you get that email I sent you?” Now I say “Hey, go check out that file I shared on the Team Zenbe flow” and I know they’ll see what I’m talking about because it’s not buried in their inbox.

Shareflow For Everyone

Shareflow is already available to paid Zenbe Mail accounts. In the next two weeks we’ll launch it as a standalone service.

We think it’s an incredibly productive way to communicate and want you to try it regardless of what email service you use. You can invite anyone to join a flow, not just people in your organization.

Free and paid plans will be available. Check back here for more news soon.

Google Wave sure does look pretty neat.

We love the idea of packaging an email thread as a separate conversation object, and letting people interact with in real-time,  like chat, or even through normal email.  We love the idea of being able to add large files or rich media to a conversation.  And inviting a person to a conversation at any time, so they can learn/use whatever they need, without us doing anything to bring them up to speed.

We love these ideas so much,  we created Shareflow!  I really need to update this screencast from a few months ago…

Of course, we are not Google: we don’t get to redefine how people use the Internet with a single demo.  We had to make Shareflow actually work for people,  and keep it compatible with what they do right now, and not force too much change at one time.

In about a week we will post how you can get a free Shareflow account.

If you can’t wait, sign up for Zenbe Mail, take advantage of the 30 day free trial,  and look at the Shareflow tab.  Using Shareflow within you email environment is particularly awesome: its easy to start a flow with emails or attachments already piling up in your inbox.

The word “Stream” seems to be popping up a lot to describe a new form of group communication. Unsurprisingly, people are looking for a way to communicate that sidesteps inbox problems.  I get hundreds of emails a day, on way too many topics. My inbox is a dumping ground of communication. I can’t part with it, but its not a solution to topic- or project-oriented communication. This is such an ordinary problem its not worth describing in any more detail, or barely worth describing at all. (I’ll post the white paper later).

We started Zenbe not just to build better email, but to build better communication, and that’s how we stumbled into creating ShareFlow – as a solution to our communication problems that are not solved by an email inbox, chat, or micro-blogging.

John Borthwick at BetaWorks poetically describes an alternate way of describing communication:

A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow.

Almost word for word, Borthwick’s description matches our pre-development concept descriptions of ShareFlow. Many of our original names were based on “stream”, but its a noisy name space, and as the creator of a popular stock streamer called “Streamer” during Web 1.0, I have a bias against using that word as a name again, except perhaps an actual stream. We went with “flow,” as ShareFlow provides a mechanism for staying in a mental state of flow, focused on a topic with a specific and collaborating audience.

Collecting content and staying focused on a specific topic with people that matter. I struggle to spend more time in flow, not less. This is where email, chat, and services based on social media fail me.  In practice, of course, its not so heavy. But as we move more  communication over to ShareFlow, it definitely improves our entire team’s ability to focus, and sidestep the clutter and perceived urgency of our email.

ShareFlow is packaged as a collaboration service within Zenbe Mail, but feedback has been so encouraging, we will be releasing it as a standalone service in a few weeks. For free. Stay Tuned.

We pushed a new release out last week, in case you didn’t notice.

Lots of minor enhancements, including a bubble previewer when you hover over a subject, but the important ones are:

Use Your Zenbe for Business account with ANY IMAP enabled address

Once you add another email address to Zenbe, you can see all its email in Zenbe, with all the advantages that gives you- integrated search, viewing and searching attachments, and more.

Zenbe also fetches and synchronizes any folders you have.

Add as many email addresses as you want.

You can also send an email from any email address.

Shareflow now open to all

You can now invite anyone to any Shareflow you create.  Once invited, they can create a profile, add comments to your shareflow, or add files.

Shareflow offers a simple yet powerful way to collaborate with colleagues, clients, customers… maybe some more people described by a word beginning with “c”, but you get the idea.

See http://www.zenbe.com/business/shareflow for more.

I did head out into the pouring rain last night to get some bourbon, which, as you probably knew, cannot be substituted with brandy in bourbon and bacon ice cream.

I guess I should not have been surprised at the people you find in a downtown liquor store  minutes before closing.  In particular, there was one woman in particularly white,  non-functional shoes, garish red lipstick, and boldly dyed hair, buying a bottle of vodka, talking about the trip she was about to take, how the store keep would not see her for awhile, but it wouldn’t be as long as her last trip.   Not sure where you can go, that time of night, in that weather, in those shoes, with luggage and vodka in tow.

Been getting some feedback from users about how soft the Zenbe design is. The buttons are  muted, they say, a bit sleepy, a bit like a washed out movie.  They want some boldly dyed hair, some red lipstick. Maybe some white shoes.

There was no shortage of intelligent, spirited debate on every aspect of Zenbe, and still is. I used to be firmly in the “add more lipstick on those buttons” camp.

But I am glad to have lost a few rounds of that particular argument, because invariably, the next message from these very same people amounts to, “I get it now, Zenbe really is making my email better-the design really works!”  While you might think you want a bold send button, and sharp edges everywhere, what you really want is to focus on your communication, not a row of buttons. Minimalist controls that fade into the background until you want them might seem a bit washed out the first time you look a them, but make sense once you start using them. Those white shoes are not getting you very far.

After much scrutiny and feedback, maybe we got the basics of Zenbe down pretty good.

So now we can have spirited debates about everything else: marketing, features, finance, customers, and where to hang the neon art.

At least the ice cream was a big hit.

Its late, its rainy, and I need some bourbon for an ice cream recipe I want to make.  I only have brandy.  I think its a very fine brandy, received as a gift years ago, patiently waiting in my liquor cabinet, but its not bourbon.  Do details like this matter?

I think they do.

Giving a demo of Zenbe for Business today, my prospective customer kept on saying “that’s neat!” He quipped at the big features, like Shareflow and Files View. He also quipped at how easy Zenbe makes it to organize email into folders.

He gave an uncontrolled “that’s neat” at  how you can share files with the “share as link” feature, either in the email composer or right from the “mail to” button in Files View.  Seems like a small feature, handy for sharing large files that people can’t get reliably in their inboxes.  But its also handy for sharing any file in a ubiquitous way, since the “share as link” function provides access to a web page where all of Zenbe’s file view functions are accessible. For example, people without MS Office can view word docs in their web browser.  Handy stuff.

Almost apologetically, Zenbe is comprised of  a host of small but time- and effort-saving features, that work within and beside the big features we explain on our website.

But the details do matter.

I need to go out and get the bourbon, don’t I?

Darn.

Email is a great communication tool.  Hundreds of millions of people spend their day getting work done, mostly in email. But it does have its problems. Especially when working with more than one other person.

When you collaborate with multiple people using email, you  assume that everybody is reading all your emails, in the right order, and saving them for later.  In real life, during a busy day, emails get lost, overlooked, read out of context, misplaced, accidentally deleted… And if a new person joins the conversation, how are they supposed to catch up?  Getting new people up to speed is especially important in the work place, where a lof of knowledge gets transferred, and quickly lost, via email.

This is not a new problem, and a lot of smart people have been creating some interesting solutions for a very long time.  Most of those, though, are designed by technical people, for technical people, and tend to be…  …complicated, and  never as effective as they should be.

Shareflow takes a different approach. A very, very simple approach. Each Zenbe for Business account starts out with a single flow for your team. You can add a comment, and it appears on the flow as if on a webpage.  Anyone on your team can add a comment to your comment, keeping the conversation together.

You can add a file, either from your desktop or easily  grab any attachement you have ever recevied or sent.  Comment on the file. Everyone on your team can view the file, and add their own comments.  All of Zenbe’s excellent file handling features, like MS Office doc rendering, or event handling from .ics attachments, all of that works on shareflow too, of course.

Need to collaborate on that new project with just a few people?  Create another flow, it takes a few seconds.  Regardless of how many separate flows you create, its very easy to keep current.  You can view all updates from any flow, or view updates flow-by-flow.

Want to invite your client to view the proposal and working docs, and see your comments?  Or add their own thoughts and avoid another giant carbon copy chain?  That’s easy, just invite them.   They won’t need a Zenbe account, they receive a URL to access the Shareflow directly, from any browser.

The best part of Shareflow is that all this knowledge and creativity is captured and searchable for all the participants to build on. No more searching for old emails, or reconstructing ideas from complicated email chains.

Take a look at Shareflow.  A picture, in this case, is worth more than a thousand words.

(Not keeping track how many words this video might be worth.)

Think Shareflow might help your business communications?  Why not sign up for the 30 day free trial?  And let us know what you think!