Ray Ozzie : It's been a few months since I've posted - a very busy and exciting time here at Groove. Both in terms of what's been happening in the business and market, but also because we're closing in on the first beta of Groove V3. I can't wait to tell you about the improvements in V3 ... because after having used it day in and day out for a few months now, I've simply never felt nearly this excited about a product that I've worked on. And that says a lot. More on V3 in a few weeks!

Groove Networks announced that its software is a core component of an information-sharing network that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced Tuesday, calling it "a key part of our national homeland security strategy."

Today we're launching our new website. It took some time but finally we have a flexible website (MT based) that is easy to maintain and more in line with our existing weblogs. Both our Groovetools and Groovy experiments are better documented on this site.

Don't forget to take the latest version of our Flashbased Floorplanner for a testdrive and let me know what you think of it.

Tim made a few improvements to the FlashHyki. The latest version can be downloaded here

Although we don't do a lot of Groove development these days, Tim couldn't resist the temptation and found time to brew something cool : FlashHyki. It's a distributed Wiki based on Flash and Groove. It offers secure decentralised collaboration without the need of a server. FlashHyki doesn't run in the GrooveClient but in a seperate application that was created using Flash MX 2004 and Flash Studio Pro. All pages are stored in a Groove filestool using Groove WebServices.

The term Hyki was introduced by Ray Ozzie in July 2003

Has anyone yet attempted to create what I guess I'd refer to as a "Hyki" - that is, a character-by-character real-time collaborative (Hydra-like, Groove Text Tool-like) editor with automatic creation of real-time linked sub-documents when CamelCase words are typed, etc. ??

Hugh Pyle immediatly took on the challenge and built a great proof-of-concept which inspired Tim for these explorations on the possibilities of rich Flashbased tools that can easily work within, as well outside the Grooveclient. Looks promising....

Chinese developer Jirong Zhou received a number of Groove spam messages.

Got up 10 sudden offline messages these 2 days. Annoying! No info in the vCard. Some only put a nickname like abc there. No more. With 'hi' 'hello' as the message body. And some even invite me to chat even I was offline. Maybe I should put my vCard on the web at all.

Mmmmm, I find this news pretty troublesome as there still is no way to protect yourself from unwanted messages in Groove once someone gets hold of your Vcard. This was discussed earlier on this weblog and in my opinion this is something that should be adressed by Groove before it becomes a real problem.

TeamDirection announced that it's Project and Dashboard tool is now available in French and German.