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

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!

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.