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I’ve got a meeting scheduled for next week where I’ll need to give a tour of of Facebook features. I thought we’d use Yugma, and I was looking forward to using that as a test platform for the tour. Yugma’s “10 connections for free” make it an attractive web conferencing system for AAUW applications…
But, Yugma just doesn’t seem to work well. I had trouble getting the client window to respond at all (seemed to depend on whether I started the session “now” or “later” and when I had the guest connection join the session). When I brought up the annotation tool, I couldn’t find a way back to the main window. I needed to use Task Manager to kill the session when things went squirrelly. Not a pretty picture to think about having members use software like that.
On a lark, I did a Google for “yugma worst” and got review that was relatively positive, but it did point me to Glance.net. Now this is interesting — an excellent example of “less is more”.
Glance is “a simple, quick desktop sharing tool for hosting live web demos, sales presentations and more.” It supports up to 100 connections.
It’s a quick download of the software (Windows or Mac) for the host. During the registration process, you choose a URL (e.g. yourname.glance.net). The download puts an icon on the taskbar (on Windows — I haven’t checked it on a Mac).
Starting a session means clicking the icon and getting a session id. [There’s an indication that you can choose the session id, but that didn’t seem to work for me on the free trial.]
To join a session, a guest simply goes to the host’s selected URL and enters the session id. No muss, no fuss.
What’s left out (compared to other web conferencing systems):
Pricing:
Random comments:
Both of those might be attributed to using two machines on one home network for the test — but maybe not. I’ve used the same two machines with other systems and haven’t noticed delays like the ones I saw with Glance.
Overall, Glance looks like a reasonable solution. Will probably use the free trial for next week’s test rather than continue to fight with Yugma. [Though Yugma does seem to be working better after a reinstall and reboot.]
I should probably check Michelle Murrain’s references again, and double check to see if there’s an Idealware note or more recent info at TechSoup. Anyone with other suggestions?
As I’ve written before, part of the Facebook seduction is the brand clean message box — no years and years of of history. I’m trying to just accept the fact that I can’t search those messages — live in the moment, if you will.
But another attraction is the fact that Facebook’s model makes spam almost impossible (but for the crazies posting Yuwie invites all over). Even though it’s possible to get mail from strangers, there’s no way to get mass e-mail from strangers. Occasionally an application gone awry will send out a message to all of your friends, but those are fairly easy to ignore/deal with.
So the “opt in” is pretty strictly enforced, and it’s easy to “opt out” of groups where there are too many messages. Contrast that to the messages you get from folks who use “blind carbon copy” recipient lists for newsletters and such — sometimes you’ve no idea how you got on the list, and you’re not sure if a message back will get you off. If you don’t know the person, you can just set a filter to transfer all their messages to the trash. But what if you do know them? And you’ve commented on this practice before? You don’t want to junk all messages from them, but you’d like to be able to differentiate personal messages from the mass mailings.
I was thinking about this again when I saw the TechSoup posting “Are you a Spammer“.
Even for noncommercial e-mails I’d suggest that there be a clear description of the purpose of the list and how to unsubscribe whenever unsolicited e-mail goes out to a large(ish) group. Holler at me if there’s a list I control where I don’t observe this dictum.
My branch president forwarded the following:
We were really intrigued by a chart we saw that showed the vast differences in volunteer retention among the 50 states, ranging from a high of 76.4 percent in Minnesota to a low of 47.2 percent in Mississippi. It seemed to us like there must be some pretty solid managerial tools that can be used to get those numbers closer to the Minnesota range, so we called on Robert Grimm, director of research and policy development for the Corporation for National and Community Service a couple of weeks ago. He pointed to the fact that one out of three people who volunteer in a year don’t volunteer at all the next year. “We have a leaky bucket in volunteering,” he said. “About 21 million people who volunteered in 2005 didn’t volunteer in 2006.”
What’s to be done? Grimm had a few ideas:
- Volunteers have to be challenged to use their skills effectively; it’s just silly to use a trained social worker to stuff envelopes.
- Regular opportunities to volunteer – rather than sporadic ones – tend to keep people interested and engaged.
- Organizations that screen and match their volunteers, provide recognition for their volunteers and have some kind of individual on staff to manage the volunteers do best at retaining these helpful people.
- Volunteers will thrive if they report to someone who demonstrates that they’re important to the organization. Many organizations give volunteers to a lower-level employee, which leads them to believe they’re not seen as an important resource.
- It can be very helpful to offer some training or professional development for the volunteers.
Food for thought … Original source: www.governing.com/manage/eletter/bgreport.htm
I haven’t been following the technical changes at LinkedIn carefully, but all of a sudden they’re starting to recommend specific LinkedIn members who are likely to be my professional contacts — and they’re actually doing a fairly good job of it. This seems to be a data mining effort that could be an excellent way to extend the social network.
But aside from staying in touch with particular folks, I haven’t really figured out how to use LinkedIn for networking. For instance, how would I “advertise” the upcoming Science House Girls Collaborative Kickoff Meeting. How could we create an AAUW “group” and would that help us connect with the varied expertise of the LinkedIn members who list AAUW as one of their activities?
May take some more thought — but back to non social-networking work for awhile…