Showing posts with label Asana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Asana. Show all posts

Monday, July 23, 2012

Asana Just Like Facebook

SAN FRANCISCO - NOVEMBER 15:  Facebook founder...
SAN FRANCISCO - NOVEMBER 15: Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during a special event announcing a new Facebook email messaging system at the St. Regis Hotel on November 15, 2010 in San Francisco, California. Facebook will launch a new messaging system aimed at enhancing it's social media product to its 500 million users. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
Asana and Facebook have a few similarities.

For one, they share founders. Some of the early Facebook people are the top people at Asana. That's there.

And both seem to tackle similar problems. Facebook tackled one aspect of our inboxes. Asana is trying to tackle another aspect of our inboxes.

But the most glaring similarity to me is that both missed out on the mobile paradigm, and both will struggle with it.
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Asana's Inbox: Work Email

English: Low-resolution image of the Asana logo.
English: Low-resolution image of the Asana logo. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Announcing Inbox: A Step Towards A Post-Email World
Email is a 40-year-old technology designed to send electronic letters, yet we rely on it to communicate and coordinate nearly everything about our work. ..... Because anyone can add anything to our email inbox, it robs us of our sense of control. ..... Redundant meetings, tedious summary reports, endless streams of status updates, all replaced by the flow of Asana’s shared task list, with all the related thinking and documents right with each task. .... the biggest “work about work” time-sink of all: using email to stay on top of everything that has changed. .... Months later, if a new teammate wants to know how a decision was made, they can just search for that task, without needing to bug you to forward them the email chain. ..... Add yourself as a follower to exactly the set of tasks that you care about. If someone adds you to a thread and it’s no longer relevant, drop off in one click. ..... every read message is archived by default, making “inbox zero” the path of least resistance. ..... Since turning on Inbox for ourselves, we’ve seen over half our email disappear. Many of us have gone from checking email multiple times an hour to a couple times a day. ..... Business is ready to evolve to a post-email world. We believe Asana is the first credible post-email application.
Death to email! And meetings, too. Asana’s new inbox takes aim at “work about work”
fake-work .... a Utopia where email doesn’t exist. ..... “People spend an enormous amount of time in their inboxes, compulsively checking,” he said in an interview yesterday at Asana’s San Francisco HQ. “And it’s slow, distracting, and inefficient. It’s almost a counterproductivity tool.” ..... Asana Inbox is hot. Hot like an assassin who is killing every namby-pamby piece of B.S. in your corporate life and letting you get back to being a creative genius. ..... “It’s incredibly satisfying,” Rosenstein said. “You have a very real sense of clarity on what you’ve done, what everyone else is working on, how to get to your milestones, how far away you are from accomplishing your project… It makes you calmer and faster, and it emboldens you to take on even more ambitious projects in the future.” ..... “Email isn’t going away tomorrow… but it wasn’t designed for the coordination of complex tasks,” he said. “It’s the lowest common denominator, you can do anything poorly in email… ..... “Our meetings are not status meetings. They’re about talking about intellectually meaty design problems or product ideas. It’s stimulating, and it leaves the coordination to the robots.” ..... would transition him from a manager to a leader — inspiring, interacting, and doing the higher-order things that he really does enjoy.”
Asana tries to end email frustration with Inbox
a huge productivity suck: email .... Users subscribe to and unsubscribe from the feeds as they want to see them ..... betting that social networking tools transformed for the enterprise will not fill the bill. It claims big customers, including Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, use the service to minimize extraneous meetings and to cut down on distractions. ..... “We don’t really see things like Yammer, SocialCast and Chatter as competitors but we also don’t see them as particularly useful. They just took something popular in the consumer space and ported them over, but research shows many people don’t see the value in them. We’re about a work graph, not the social graph,” Rosenstein said ..... Asana’s service is free for up to 30 users ..... a central column of new information flowing through, showing you all the activity happening with you and your colleagues ..... So if Peter Ha marked a task you assigned him as complete, you’ll know that he’s finished editing a guest post.
With New “Inbox” Feature, Asana Is Looking More Like That Email Slayer We’re All Longing For
Asana’s answer to email puts ‘inbox zero’ within easy reach
a few email chains, a handful of phone calls, one to two hours of meetings, and a dozen text messages later, you have a better but painful idea of what’s happening. The evolving state of the office and the increasing popularity of remote workers as well as the many, disparate pieces of technology we all use has complicated the matter intensely.
Asana’s Inbox a step towards ridding offices of “work about work”
"Each email is an isolated random string of text without any context" ..... All keystrokes happen in real-time on everybody's computer screen, just like in a Google Doc. ..... In fact, Facebook still manages internal operations using a custom version of Asana that Moskovitz and Rosenstein built while at the company. ..... Asana's Inbox looks like your Facebook News Feed, except without all the pictures, and without all the stuff that isn't deliberately shared with you. Inbox contains updates to tasks, comments, due date changes, and other status updates people would normally reserve for email...... So Asana has built a new communication client with tons of metadata, file storage, and organization tools, but the place most people are increasingly checking for work-related messages is on a smartphone. ..... "Mobile is the weakest part of the experience right now," Rosenstein admitted. "It's our top priority." Asana also isn't yet an email replacement because it's catered to team communication. Random one-to-one emails with cat picture attachments between friends don't yet have much of a place on the service, but Rosenstein says that the long term goal is to kill email entirely. "Email isn't going away tomorrow," he said. "It was originally designed to mimic the way the post office sends messages. We've only gotten by because it's the lowest possible denominator."
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Character Limits In Email

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase
Imagine an email service where when someone emails you for the first time their message has a character limit of something like 200. If you never open up their emails, they stay put at 200. And their messages don't count against your inbox space.

But if you open up their email, their limit goes up to 300 or 400 characters. But if you don't reply to their email, they stay there. On the other hand you could simply ban them and their privileged 200 characters are also gone.

But if you read and reply, the character limit goes up to 500 or more. Unless you specifically click on a button that allows them limitless space.

At one end are email concepts like on Facebook where you message me because we are connected. At the other end are regular email services where anyone can send you anything.

The inbox has to be like a cellular membrane. It has to protect the cell, but it also has to selectively allow outside stuff.

Beyond this "membrane" there have to be hard core demarcations. Facebook seems to have nailed social communication. Seems like people you know really well are only so many. And I feel like Asana is cracking the code on work communication. I have been reading up on it.


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Saturday, February 11, 2012

A Facebook Supported Online Parliament


I just came across this interesting idea on TechCrunch.

Jon Evans: Is Facebook Finally Going To Do Something Interesting?

An online parliament would be nice. The administrator would invite people or keep the voter pool open. The online parliament would allow for the holding of elections and subsequent debates.

Say I run an organization that has 500 members. I would use the Facebook Online Parliament to get all members to join, and then to hold elections, and to hold subsequent debates. The debate of course would include the organization's budget.

The election process has the nomination process. Say there are five offices and 30 people running for each of them. The organization should have the option to hold a run off election between the top two vote getters.

I think it would be fun. It would be great. It would make some serious noise if Facebook were to make it possible to do this at large scales. How about being able to do it for an organization with 10,000 members? Or a country with half a million people? Or, god forbid, a country with 50 million people? The election commission of the country would have to put together an official list saying these Facebook members are voting citizens. That would be a challenge, but a much lesser challenge than is the putting together of the current offline voter lists. They leave out too many people in the first place.

This would be huge.

This is not Facebook Groups. The Facebook Online Parliament would be a whole different ball game, a different magnitude altogether.

I hope they nail this by the next F8 Conference.

This online parliament would be great for democratic organizations where each person is one vote. Something different would have to be built for corporate organizations. Facebook should go ahead and built that too.

Buy Asana. Integrate it into Facebook. Add features.