What I've been doing for the past year
Feb. 16th, 2005 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurForgive me a blatant plug, but this is what I've been working on for the past couple of years, and now that ASAP Express has been properly unveiled I think it's time to talk it up a little. Besides, as I'll describe below, it's specifically relevant to LJ this time around.
ASAP is a curious little tool -- it's either a superpowered IM system or a simplified Web Conferencing system, depending on how you look at it. When you sign up for it, you get a little console, much like the one for Windows Messenger or AIM or suchlike, letting you set up chat sessions but with a bunch of extra functionality.
Some of you took a look at the beta for ASAP 1.0. A number of new features have been added for 2.1. Probably the most important is ASAP Links. If you're an ASAP user, you can publish a "link" on your blog, email signature or wherever. This link shows your current presence to the reader -- if they click on the presence, it fires up a meeting with you. They don't have to download anything: the system is Flash-based, so it works with about 95% of all browsers. It'll even do audio & video meetings if you have a microphone and/or camera.
So for example, the below is my ASAP link:
<input ... >Talk to Justin if available!
If this says that I'm available, it means that you can just click on it to chat with me. (I'm actually unavailable most of the time, I'm afraid -- since I'm the core server developer, I'm usually pointing to the development servers instead of the real ones. But this week I should be online a bunch.) Please feel free to try it out. It works best with a broadband connection of some sort -- while the meeting doesn't require any download, it's a pretty hefty Flash movie, and can take a while to fetch over a slow pipe. I've also put this link into my Bio, so it should be permanently available.
For those who are curious, here are some of the other goodies in the system:
In meetings, ASAP has integrated screen sharing, again thanks to the stuff hidden inside Flash. You can declare a screen-sharing session and instantly show what's going on in a window or on the whole screen. This is really useful when trying to explain how something works. It also has special gadgetry for sharing PowerPoint presentations -- not exactly a key feature for most of my friends, but often useful in a business setting.
The Meet ASAP feature was one of the first ones we created, and is still one of my favorites for business use. You can declare that you need to meet with, say, five other ASAP users at the first opportunity. The system will keep track of that request, and the next time all of you are available, it will tell you that you can start the meeting now. It'll keep tracking this for you until you either have the meeting or cancel the request.
Scheduled Meetings are one of our particularly WebEx-like features. You can say that you will be having a meeting at, say, 3pm tomorrow. ASAP will send you an email that you can forward to everyone you want in the meeting, with a web link in it; if you want, you can get this meeting in iCal format, which imports into most kinds of appointment books. At the scheduled time, people just click on the link, enter their name and email address, and *poof* -- they're in the meeting.
Lifelines are probably the most powerful feature in the system, although they're only available in the ASAP Pro version. The Lifeline is a bunch of people, any of which might be contacted for the same purpose -- for example, a lot of companies are creating IT Support Lifelines. They show up as a single presence: if anyone in the Lifeline is Available, then the Lifeline shows up as Available. When someone tries to contact the Lifeline, they get any one of those people in a meeting, to work on the issue. Lifelines can also be published as Links, just like people can, so you can create things like Sales Lifelines that you put on a web page: if someone wants to get in touch with your Sales Department, they just click on the link and instantly get an audio/video meeting with one of the salespeople. (In fact, that's how we're doing our own sales.)
The thing that's really new this month is the restructuring of the prices, and particularly the release of ASAP Express, which is a free version of the product. It's specifically aimed at the blog community, to do exactly what I did above: you can publish your link in your blog to make yourself available for outside contact. While the ASAP Console only runs on Windows still (sorry about that -- the usual economic constraints), anyone can contact you: since the meetings themselves are strictly Flash-based, they run on almost all browsers and operating systems.
Before anyone asks, the catch is that ASAP Express is only free for two-person meetings. That's generally fine for most casual chats, but not enough for many business purposes, which is why it was set up this way. If you add more people into a meeting, there's a substantial charge (15 cents/minute, so somewhere between the cost of long distance and roaming). Really, the point is to convince people that it's a useful business tool and upgrade to ASAP Pro, which costs $250/year and lets you get unlimited meetings of up to 15 people. $250/year sounds like a lot, but from a business viewpoint it's actually pretty cheap given how powerful the system is. We're not really competing with things like AIM -- rather, we're mostly focused on WebEx, which costs easily ten times that much.
Okay, enough advertisement. I encourage y'all to download it and try it out. Like I said, the whole point of ASAP Express is to come up with a blog-friendly version of the system. Please ask questions if you have them -- my self-appointed mission right now is to evangelize a little around LJ. So please spread the word...
ASAP is a curious little tool -- it's either a superpowered IM system or a simplified Web Conferencing system, depending on how you look at it. When you sign up for it, you get a little console, much like the one for Windows Messenger or AIM or suchlike, letting you set up chat sessions but with a bunch of extra functionality.
Some of you took a look at the beta for ASAP 1.0. A number of new features have been added for 2.1. Probably the most important is ASAP Links. If you're an ASAP user, you can publish a "link" on your blog, email signature or wherever. This link shows your current presence to the reader -- if they click on the presence, it fires up a meeting with you. They don't have to download anything: the system is Flash-based, so it works with about 95% of all browsers. It'll even do audio & video meetings if you have a microphone and/or camera.
So for example, the below is my ASAP link:
<input ... >Talk to Justin if available!
If this says that I'm available, it means that you can just click on it to chat with me. (I'm actually unavailable most of the time, I'm afraid -- since I'm the core server developer, I'm usually pointing to the development servers instead of the real ones. But this week I should be online a bunch.) Please feel free to try it out. It works best with a broadband connection of some sort -- while the meeting doesn't require any download, it's a pretty hefty Flash movie, and can take a while to fetch over a slow pipe. I've also put this link into my Bio, so it should be permanently available.
For those who are curious, here are some of the other goodies in the system:
In meetings, ASAP has integrated screen sharing, again thanks to the stuff hidden inside Flash. You can declare a screen-sharing session and instantly show what's going on in a window or on the whole screen. This is really useful when trying to explain how something works. It also has special gadgetry for sharing PowerPoint presentations -- not exactly a key feature for most of my friends, but often useful in a business setting.
The Meet ASAP feature was one of the first ones we created, and is still one of my favorites for business use. You can declare that you need to meet with, say, five other ASAP users at the first opportunity. The system will keep track of that request, and the next time all of you are available, it will tell you that you can start the meeting now. It'll keep tracking this for you until you either have the meeting or cancel the request.
Scheduled Meetings are one of our particularly WebEx-like features. You can say that you will be having a meeting at, say, 3pm tomorrow. ASAP will send you an email that you can forward to everyone you want in the meeting, with a web link in it; if you want, you can get this meeting in iCal format, which imports into most kinds of appointment books. At the scheduled time, people just click on the link, enter their name and email address, and *poof* -- they're in the meeting.
Lifelines are probably the most powerful feature in the system, although they're only available in the ASAP Pro version. The Lifeline is a bunch of people, any of which might be contacted for the same purpose -- for example, a lot of companies are creating IT Support Lifelines. They show up as a single presence: if anyone in the Lifeline is Available, then the Lifeline shows up as Available. When someone tries to contact the Lifeline, they get any one of those people in a meeting, to work on the issue. Lifelines can also be published as Links, just like people can, so you can create things like Sales Lifelines that you put on a web page: if someone wants to get in touch with your Sales Department, they just click on the link and instantly get an audio/video meeting with one of the salespeople. (In fact, that's how we're doing our own sales.)
The thing that's really new this month is the restructuring of the prices, and particularly the release of ASAP Express, which is a free version of the product. It's specifically aimed at the blog community, to do exactly what I did above: you can publish your link in your blog to make yourself available for outside contact. While the ASAP Console only runs on Windows still (sorry about that -- the usual economic constraints), anyone can contact you: since the meetings themselves are strictly Flash-based, they run on almost all browsers and operating systems.
Before anyone asks, the catch is that ASAP Express is only free for two-person meetings. That's generally fine for most casual chats, but not enough for many business purposes, which is why it was set up this way. If you add more people into a meeting, there's a substantial charge (15 cents/minute, so somewhere between the cost of long distance and roaming). Really, the point is to convince people that it's a useful business tool and upgrade to ASAP Pro, which costs $250/year and lets you get unlimited meetings of up to 15 people. $250/year sounds like a lot, but from a business viewpoint it's actually pretty cheap given how powerful the system is. We're not really competing with things like AIM -- rather, we're mostly focused on WebEx, which costs easily ten times that much.
Okay, enough advertisement. I encourage y'all to download it and try it out. Like I said, the whole point of ASAP Express is to come up with a blog-friendly version of the system. Please ask questions if you have them -- my self-appointed mission right now is to evangelize a little around LJ. So please spread the word...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 06:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 06:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 06:23 pm (UTC)OK, I'll try testing from home later. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 06:13 pm (UTC)them.
Is there a good reason not to open a new namespace for handles?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 06:24 pm (UTC)Truth to tell, I think the decision was made solely on the basis of "That's how Microsoft does it", which motivated a number of early tie-breaker decisions. In the business communities that they were originally talking to, it's what most of the customers wanted. But it's worth noting that, in the blog-focused world that ASAP Express is going after, that decision is more questionable than in the business-focused one of ASAP Pro...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 06:28 pm (UTC)I'm more than happy to be available via a web site or other thing under a pseudonym. But I sure don't want my email addressed posted or poached that way.
I could create a faux or temporary email address for purposes of registration, but that would break some of the functionality.
Sorry, dude - it's not seriously broken, but it is broken. Wouldn't it be neat if I could have one ASAP account, and a sequence of pseudonyms that pointed to it, that were contextually appropriate?
(How could they see the value of multiple persons on a single identity, like a Lifeline, and not see the utility of multiple identities on a single person? Crazy.)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 06:53 pm (UTC)Do note that the links themselves don't have one's email address in them -- this exact issue was one of the motivations behind that decision, since the link format was designed by the engineers, not the business folk.
Also, it's actually pretty hard (hopefully not possible) to use the system for email address poaching: unless you leave it as your handle, it's only visible from the ASAP Console Buddy List -- and the only way to get someone onto the Buddy List is to have their email address. So while I can definitely agree that it's not as privacy-secure as one might wish, it shouldn't be useful for harvesting.
(Note that, while it asks for an email address when you ask to meet with someone via an ASAP Link, it does no validation of that address -- you can basically put in anything that's syntactically legal. It's requested mainly so that the target can make a reasonably informed decision about whether to accept the "call" or not, and for internal schema reasons.)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 07:40 pm (UTC)Really? Because that's not true of the sign-up page -- it choked on a syntactically legal email address.
Earth to Convoq: the "+" character is syntactically legal in email addresses.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 10:50 pm (UTC)I'll log a bug for it -- thanks...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 11:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 08:25 pm (UTC)You haven't tried to download the free version, have you?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 10:57 pm (UTC)But yes, to register for the system and become a user, you have to have a real, validated email address. Frankly, I wouldn't permit us to do otherwise -- it's simply too open to abuse if you allow that degree of anonymity. (Especially because our system will send email on behalf of the user under certain circumstances, so it would be a spam vector if we didn't verify user email addresses.)
*That* isn't going to change. I can see it being an issue for a small fraction of the population, but it would be very problematic for us to do otherwise...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 07:04 pm (UTC)Of course, at that point, I immediately reloaded this web page, expecting that the link would have updated to show you were no longer available. Alas, it still claimed you were.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 07:14 pm (UTC)I'm about to go biking (
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 07:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 08:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-16 11:10 pm (UTC)Sigh -- the hardest part of new and different features is always the UI...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-17 03:40 am (UTC)Not to belabour the point, but being told in two different windows, at the same time, that you are both unavailable and available isn't subtle. One of them would unsubtly seem to be wrong.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-17 04:03 am (UTC)They are both "availability", in a sense, and both have been boiled down to the same word in order to simplify the UI. But they don't mean exactly the same thing, and that distinction is precisely what's causing the confusion. Both statements are precisely correct in the sense that they intend; the error is that they look too much alike to the end user...
Flash can share screens?
Date: 2005-02-17 03:43 pm (UTC)Gack. Flash can share my desktop with somebody? What kind of provisions are there against J. Random Flash Movie doing this without my knowing?
Re: Flash can share screens?
Date: 2005-02-17 04:31 pm (UTC)Of course, most developers don't even know that the screen-sharing is there: it's one of the advanced features that we're plugged into because we're doing serious app development in Flash...
Re: Flash can share screens?
Date: 2005-02-18 12:52 am (UTC)Back when I worked in another educational media lab, we had a specific app for screen-sharing, but I don't remember the name of it. This was pre-Flash.
Re: Flash can share screens?
Date: 2005-02-18 01:03 am (UTC)Lifelines
Date: 2005-02-17 03:44 pm (UTC)Ah--it's a hunt group...plus doing the Right Thing with presence. Clever.
Re: Lifelines
Date: 2005-02-17 04:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-18 12:49 am (UTC)I did notice that the Asapsvc process keeps running in the background after I quit the app, and it also starts when I start up my computer even though I told it not to. The app doesn't start, but the process is still there going in the background. Since I have a computer of relatively little brain, having stuff run that I don't need/want running is a dislike for me.
Adding to the complaints about email as handle, I noticed after importing my second AIM list (I have two AIM accounts, and they each have each other on their buddy list so I can tell if I've left one running somewhere it's not supposed to be) that I got a little message that said "[email address] has joined ASAP and will appear in your Contact List under that name instead of: [AIM username]". Now, I deliberately used a medium-level address when I signed up(Hotmail, as opposed to say, my Simmons account) and I also don't tend to waste time IMing with people I actively don't want having my e-mail address, so I'm not too bothered personally. But I can see where others would get their nose out of joint about it, since they've basically just had a message sent out giving their email to someone who might not have had it.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-18 01:01 am (UTC)That process sticks around because it's the demon that hooks into the other IM systems -- it's how we synchronize with the other buddy lists, send invitations through the other IMs, and so on. It needs to be around when the other IMs start up, because the hooking happens mainly when they log in. But it's a fair complaint not to want that. I'll put in a suggestion that some people really do want *nothing* to start at system start, and provide a way to do that. (The checkbox that's there is for the ASAP Console itself, which is a separate process from the background asapsvc.)
I hadn't thought about automerge WRT privacy, but that's a very interesting point. Basically, we do merge all identities into a single one, so when an IM contact joins ASAP we unify the buddy identities. But I'll pass on the concerns about the implications of that...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-18 01:30 am (UTC)I'm of mixed opinion about privacy stuff, but I do try to keep note of it when it occurs because I know others can be very sensitive. With the nearly sole exception of my cell phone number, I tend to be pretty uncaring about my own personal info. Many others I know are not so laid-back about it, some with very good reason.
(For instance, I don't know if you're on a Certain Local Mailing List, but basically someone sent out an email the other day informing everyone about Google's feature that allows you to type in any not-unlisted telephone number and receive the name of the person it's registered to and a clickable link on a map to their house. The possible ramifications of that sent chills up my spine, even though I'm aware that if one has a published phone number it's a short leap from the phone book to MapQuest.)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-18 04:16 am (UTC)There's a current of thought that says that privacy as we know it was largely a temporary aberration: that previous centuries didn't really have all that much privacy, and that the future isn't going to either. That scares me in some hard-to-define ways, but it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out to be true...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-18 01:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-18 04:09 pm (UTC)