Just read some very sad news on Neil's weblog : Forrest Duncan died of an heart attack last friday. The first time i met Forrest was when i invited him to participate in the Rotterdam Groove conference in April 2002. When he arrived in Rotterdam there was an instant connection between us. We had a fun and productive weekend and i think his presence was an important factor in the succes of the conference. Forrest was a great guy to hang out and have beers and laughs with but was also incredibly focussed on getting results from a business perspective and a very creative thinker. Our last meeting was last year september in Boston at Groove HQ where we enjoyed many good beers and conversations and we even shed a few tears talking about my new babyboy and kids in general.
Bye Forrest, I'm gonna miss you and i know you leave a lot of people behind who loved you dearly and are shattered by this tragic loss. What a terrible waste......

Don Park is thinking out loud on distributed Wiki's (in Groove?) which sounds very similar to Ray and Hugh's Hyki.

Neil and Phil add their thoughts on the subject of Groove Spam

Frank Arndt points to a new public Groovespace : Groove Humanitarian System. You can acces the space using this link

Neil reresponds on my previous post :

On spam - well I would say its a generalisation of the email spam problem. Its a tricky one but in essence no tricker than the situation we're already faced with in terms of our net identities being compromised. Groove.net is accessible to me right now with wildcards - why does the introduction of a space charge change this radically ?

I think there are some big differences between email and Groove when it comes to spam. You can choose to hide your Vcard from the public groove.net directory. Just see if you can find Ray Ozzie's Vcard, even if you use wildcards. I don't think you'll find him listed but i'm pretty sure he uses Groove so now and then ;-)

There are a few ways to get hold of somebody's Vcard when he or she is not listed in the Groove.net directory. The normal way is that the user sends you the Vcard personally by email or IM but if you have established some sort of contact in the past like you both shared a Groovespace no matter how brief, you can allways find the contact details of that user in your "known Groove Contacts" You can add him or her to your contacts withouth specific aproval. Once you have someones Vcard you can send him messages and there is no way for that user to ignore these messages and unwanted attachments.

If you have a high profile, celebrity status or just very keen on your privacy, you would like to make sure your Vcard doesn't get out there as you can't block "stalkers" from your Groove account once they get hold of your Vcard.
With email you would use a spam filter or just ignore the user and routinely delete these messages with the rest of the unsollicited spam but having an agressive spammer in Groove would leave you in the end with no other option then to make a new Groove account therefore you would be very choosy which space to join and who to send a message.

There is probably a way to ignore and block out specific users using the Groove's Enterprise Integration Server but most users have Groove Preview or the standard edition so they don't have this ability. I have allways considered this a flaw in Groove but please correct me if i'm wrong or overlooking something here.

As long as i have used Groove (over 2,5 years) i have never experienced a stalker or any other rude or unwanted behaviour but the moment Groove would be used on a more massive scale these problems could arise.

Still i think the idea of payed Groove spaces is an interesting one, especcially in business settings where you would pay for instant access to specific data and more importantly a network of people. I think Groove would be more just for small, high value spaces like a F100 CEO Network, Special (medical) research spaces or your personal Anthony Robbins Motivation space. This is a much more natural fit for Groove then large, low cost, (celebrity) spaces of some sort.

btw : Hugh posts some earlier ideas on using Groovespaces for Artist promotion.

Neil Finlayson relaunches the idea of paid Groovespaces. In one of his earlier posts he also touches this subject with the thought of a set of Groovespaces around celebrities.

Although i really like the idea i still think there some basic issues with the current version of Groove that make this idea difficult to implement. One is the sluggish behaviour of Groovespaces when they are flooded with users, chats and comments. Besides that, there is still no way to ignore a specific user meaning that once your vcard is known to a person, this person could easily stalk you with loads of unwanted messages which are much more difficult to ignore then normal spam emails.

Playing around with the SuiteWiki, i stumbled upon these GrooveNet and GrooveFaq pages on the Portland Pattern Repository's Wiki .

Michael Helfrich talks about the way Hugh's Newstool is used by Groove and their clients.

During the Iraq war, Groove was leveraged for medical supply logistics support. While the coalition had many folks in the villages capturing medical needs, they would also hear of needs through reports in the mainstream media. The News tool culls relevant news articles from multiple open sources, and populates the Groove shared space where relief workers from the NGO's, as well as coalition logistics personnel, can auto-discover needs where human assets were not available to uncover the need.

Check out the our new Wiki. A Wiki is a repository links and infopages that can easily be edited and extended. The SuiteWiki is an experiment and we'll see if it proves to be a useful tool for us. Please pay a visit to the GrooveWiki and add your tools, links and other interesting bits of information.

A very worthreading post from Michael Helfrich on the usage of Groove in Peace negotation processes.

Recently, we were able to observe very specific social phenomenon that has added a new twist to the use of space-based social software like Groove. It is the idea of the shared space as a neutral and virtual place for shared goals.

The Virtual Negotiation Table in Southern Asia/New York/Helsinki: Groove was used less than eight weeks ago to broker peace in a nation in southern Asia. During the mid-80's, tension between the majority and the separatists on this island nation erupted into full blown ethnic war, with 10's of thousands of people losing their lives. Leveraged by some very bright folks from the Nobel Peace Laureate, and with the wisdom and guidance of James A. at Groove, a set of "Peace Tools" was developed and deployed to assist in a new round of peace negotiations.

Gxcel, the Collaborative Excel solution, enters it's last round of Betatesting. From what i heard from Ashok is the official date for the commercial release not far away.

I'm in the process of slowly filling the Suitelab Weblog with some of our earlier prototypes and experiments on Groove, Flash and Weblogs. The most recent addition is an overview of our first Public Groovespace Experiment in June 2002.

Michael Helfrich offers some insights on how Groove was used during Operation Iraqi Freedom

The day that "event swarming" became obvious was the day that the statue of Saddam was brought down. As Rapid Assessments were received by members of the space, we would receive Groove IM's directing us to the form and space in which it resided. What was fascinating was to see the number of people that would click through the IM and arrive in the shared space. Where there had been 5 people working in the space, there were now 50. Instantaneously, the space became super-charged with activity, which was most evident in the chat pane as people, separated by thousands of miles, began to discuss what needed to be done, who needed to do it, and decide when it would happen.

We have been working a couple of new weblogs that are part of the new Suite75 site. The new blogs are:

Tim Knip's log : This is the renewed version of Tim's old Radio weblog.

SUITELAB : A chronlogical overview of prototypes and experiments on Groove, Flash and Blogs by Suite75. Here you can find information on a number of Groovetools we've developed like our CADviewer, Visioviewer and the Interoptool for Radio.

Reports on Flash : Yet another Flash weblog, with a strong focus on Flashbased (collaborative) applications.

The September issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal has article (not online yet) titled Data Sharing with P2PdataShare. The article says P2PdataShare uses "Groove, which provides a secure, reliable platform for collaborative applications such as DSP2PS. P2PdataShare is implemented as a Groove tool and utilizes the following technologies: Groove services, GDK, Jscript, ADO, XML and SQL. The print article concludes:

P2PdataShare is flexible and adaptable to any real-world domain, such as supply-chain management, pharmaceuticals, and life-cycle analysis, to name a few. It also offers an inexpensive solution for companies that are undergoing mergers and acquisitions that may have independent databases. Currently, P2PdataShare provides a generic database adapter for databases on relational DBMSs. In the future, we will be investigating ways to extend P2PdataShare to provide adapters for other kinds of databases, such as object-oriented databases, XML databases and text databases.

A tip for all Groove-developers: The sourcecode for P2PdataShare is available and can be found here.

Vattekkat Babu has a aggregated view of all the Groove Weblogs on his website. Ofcourse there is a RSS feed available too. Very nice!!!!

Boston Globe : Challenging times despite good prospects

For Groove, the tour of duty in Iraq supplied a nice case study about how its software could be used in intense, high-stakes situations. Although the company loaned its software to all of the users in Iraq, in July, Groove started what it calls the humanitarian systems group, headed by Helfrich, which aims to sell the software to aid groups, government agencies, and nonprofits.

There is a new public Groovespace that holds a list of all the other public Groovespaces that are available. The space was setup by James Roe-Smith and an invitation can be found here