We’ve had an incredible response to the release of our stand-alone version of Shareflow and want to thank the thousands of users who have signed up over the past two weeks.

We’re working hard to collect all your feedback, open up a dialogue with our passionate users, and deliver the next set of great features in Shareflow.

Shareflow has also gotten some great press lately. Check out some of these articles to read more about Shareflow from an outside perspective and perhaps learn a new use for your team.

Shareflow Emerges as Competition for Google Wave
Chelsi Nakano (cmswire.com)

Shareflow: Online Group Messaging and Collaboration
(makeuseof.com)

Shareflow: Have Conversations Instead of Email Overload
Darrell Etherington (webworkerdaily.com)

Shareflow shows the future of group communication
Matt Marshall (venturebeat.com)

Here at Zenbe we like to do something that I call “Taking Javascript Seriously”, and it’s one of the core principles that stands behind Shareflow, Zenbe Mail, and Zenbe Lists, making them as slick and speedy as they are. It means that we rely on a rich layer of Javascript to process and render your emails, flows, and to-do lists. Most of the work that happens in Zenbe applications happens right inside your browser, with the underlying data getting synced back up to the cloud when it’s convenient.

So we’re always excited about the possibilities that arise when new Javascript features become available, and the upcoming implementations of HTML5 promise to bring along a real wealth of new scriptable goodies. Looking to the past, as well as to the future, the HTML5 team has decided to standardize a number of old, browser-specific features — this means that some of the ostensibly new features in HTML5 have already been around for years, and that some are even ready to use right now.

Today, we’re introducing web drag and drop for Shareflow, so that you can quickly and easily share images, text, links, and web clips, just by dragging them into a flow. Say you’re surfing the New York Times, and you see a paragraph from the front page that you’d like to share. Select the paragraph, drag it into Shareflow, and you can share it instantly with the rest of your team. Drag and drop works with word processing applications as well, you can drag in the text of a progress report or business outline. If you have a link to a document or image on the web, dragging the link into Shareflow will upload that document to the Flow, just as if you had used the file uploader to post it directly. Try browsing around your favorite photography website and dropping the pictures right into a flow.

Despite being so new, drag and drop has pretty good browser support. We’ve tested it and confirmed that it works in the following browsers:

• Firefox 3.5
• Safari 4
• Internet Explorer 7
• Google Chrome

The new drag and drop specification is a great step forward, but there are still plenty of differences and quirks lurking among the browsers. To help alleviate the incompatibilities, we’re open-sourcing a little bit of Javascript from our internal framework, a class called the zen.util.DropManager. If you’re a web developer, and you’d like to use HTML5 drag and drop in your projects, give the DropManager a try.

When you attach it to an HTML element, the DropManager takes care of enabling it as a drop target, handling some differences between the types of data that the browsers provide, and giving you back a clean object with the three potential parts you care about: URLs, HTML fragments, and plain text. You can grab the code right here:

http://gist.github.com/153019
(The DropManager depends on the Prototype Javascript framework).

If you find the DropManager useful, please feel free to fork it on GitHub and improve it.

If you want to see it in action, sign up for a free Shareflow account. Cheers!

Even before Alex Payne’s tweet, the debate has been raging in tweets and blogs: did we make Shareflow  to copy Google Wave?

Well, what do you think?

I think this debate is such a great example of  how people’s brains are wired to make causal assumptions based on  recent history of hearing things.  This is why people think sharks are dangerous to people, and that shark attacks come in waves, based on hearing or reading about shark attacks, when the statistics show that shark attacks are remarkably constant from year to year.  Toasters, donkeys, and coconuts on beaches are all much more likely to kill you than a shark, regardless of what you hear.  I am sure Malcolm Gladwell has a book about this, but one of my favorites is this one, that I picked up at Heathrow one dreary winter day.

Let’s suppose that Zenbe HAD copied Google Wave. That would mean that Zenbe managed to design, build and deploy a real, complete, useable product, along with everything needed to actually support a public service, all in less than a month!  That would be phenomenal!   Miraculous! You should check out Shareflow just to see the magic!

If you search the Internet you will realize that Shareflow must be a separate, independent solution, perhaps to a similiar problem, and has nothing to do with Google Wave.

Shareflow grew out of our own efforts at solving our own communication and collaboration needs.  We wanted a something that would let us ditch IM, email, wikis, and other disconnected tools.  We have been working on Shareflow for more than a year, its been out in public since February 09, in private testing for a few  months before that.

You want proof?  How about  a Youtube video from March, or a  blog post from April?  Or this one.  Or just ask anyone who signed up for our subscription service Zenbe Mail earlier this year.

The history of technology is filled with solutions that are appear to be copies but that actually arise independently. My favorite example is the Soviet Space Shuttle, Buran.  Did you know that the Soviets built and launched a space shuttle in the 1980’s?  It looks like an exact copy of an American one, caused quite a shock, people started looking for spies, but the educated conclusion was that if you need a spaceship that has to land like a plane, carry a few people, and haul payload of a certain size, its going to look pretty much exactly like a space shuttle.

Google, or any large company, can afford big announcements of grand visions.  Google Wave might be a good idea, and it might be a big success.   Wave seems a long way off from being a usable solution for us regular folks.

Shareflow is here to make your life better, and your teams’ life better, right here. right now.   Give it a try.

Reade more about Shareflow here.  Or just signup . its free!

Every Shareflow account has access to a Shareflow bookmarklet. The bookmarklet is a simple button you drag to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. It makes it simple to share links and images from any web site. Browsing an article you want to share with your team? Click the “Shareflow this” button in your bookmarks bar and you’ll be able to share the link with your comments in one click.

Sharing Email

The bookmarklet goes one step further and allows you to share important emails with the click of a button. Have an email in your Inbox that you need to post to a Shareflow to share with your team? Click the “Shareflow this” button and the bookmarklet will grab a copy of the email you are viewing and post it the flow of your choice.

Share an email in one click

The email-sharing feature of the bookmarklet works with Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live Mail, and of course Zenbe mail.

You can access the bookmarklet for your account on your Shareflow login page. Look for this announcement the next time you login:

Look for this on your login page

I don’t think I am alone in spending more time on Facebook, Twitter, and their ilk on my mobile device than on my computer.

When we are out and about is when interesting things happen, when ideas come to us.  What great idea  came to someone as they stared at a screen in a windowless office? Ideas hit us when the apple drops on our head.   We don’t have an apple tree in our office. Let me know if you do.

I don’t, and often can’t,   rely on social media to broadcast my good ideas.  What if its private, useful to a small audience? I could use email.  Honestly,  I am afraid to open my email sometimes.  Not only do I get too much of it, but its distracting.  If I check my email on my mobile device, its likely that some unimportant yet urgent message will attract my attention, and that will suck my time, and possibly my will to live, before I tell my colleagues about the important stuff.

In our office, our conversations  are on Shareflow. I hardly ever get an email from my colleagues anymore. When I access Shareflow, simply by logging into  Zenbe  on my mobile browser, I  check on the important stuff, without distraction, and get my ideas out, without cluttering up anyone’s inbox.

Shareflow keeps me focused, in the office, or on the road.  In fact, my flows are so important, that when searching for a screenshot, I had to go specifically to our goof flow, where we talk about oddball stuff: everything else was crammed with sensitive  information.

Take a look at Shareflow Mobile by logging in to your shareflow account on your mobile browser. Works great on BlackBerry and iPhone.

Shareflow works on your mobile phone