Have you ever noticed the “Tell Us More About You” box in the download page?

As part of the Slife 2.0 release, we included a form right next to the Slife download button where present and future Slife users can share with us why they are interested in the app and how they plan to use it.

Our primary goal with the information we collect is to understand how to best improve Slife, especially in terms of developing new features, prioritizing bug fixes and improving Slife’s user interface.

Well, the information we’ve received so far has proved to be immensely useful and interesting. Since the 2.0 release, we’ve received hundreds of entries and have looked at them very closely. To make it easier to go over all the entries and extract key points, we’ve built a couple of word clouds with the nice Wordle tool.

First, here’s a word cloud that refers to “who” is using Slife:

And here’s another that synthesizes “why” people are using Slife:

Over time, we expect that these clouds might change slightly. We will post them here from time to time and compare them. And if you haven’t filled-out the form yet, now is your chance!

It’s been a busy summer for us here at Slife Labs, with the release of Slife 2.0 and Slife Teams. One of our priorities has been to be super responsive when it comes to feature requests and bug fixes. We posted an updated to Slife 2.0 already and we are working on a bigger release, Slife 2.1.

As far as Slife Teams, we already have more than 200 teams, groups and businesses with accounts, evaluating and using the system. It’s still in beta, so there’s a lot of work that we can do to improve the service. Closer to the end of the month we will be rolling out a new release for Slife Teams, with new features. Slife Teams is slowly becoming a great platform for group actvitiy analytics and collaboration. If you don’t have an account yet, let us know and we will send one your way.

Finally, Slife Windows 2.0 has been a major focus this month of August. It’s coming along very nicely and we would like to have a beta out fairly soon. In the meantime, enjoy your summer!

It’s been a month since we released Slife 2.0. Today we have an update, Slife v2.0.1, that addresses a number of issues in the v2.0 that came up in the forum and in our own tests. Here’s the list of changes:

• Added label to side panel
• Removed activities from side panel
• Improved search performance
• Optimized performance of all visualizations
• Fixed drawing bug in Month view
• Fixed scrolling bug in Applications, Web & Documents and Activities view
• Fixed selection/highlight bug in Activities view
• Displaying icons correctly for Microsoft Office 2004/2008 applications
• Displaying icons correctly for Adobe CS3 applications
• Displaying icon correctly for iWork’s Numbers
• Replaced Activity Editor window with an inspector-type window
• Added File menu, removed Activity menu from menu bar
• Fixed bug that prevented Activities from saving when app quit
• Added ability to delete apps from application tracking list

You can download Slife v2.0.1 here. We will be updating the link in the download page and releasing it through auto-update for everyone later this week.

Over the next few weeks we will be working on some of the excellent, but more substancial feature suggestions. Stay close!

On Tuesday this week, the inaugural event of the Information Overload Research Group (IORG) took place in New York City. ‘What is the IORG?’, you might ask:

The Information Overload Research Group (IORG) is “a group of industry practitioners, academic researchers, and consultants dedicated to reducing information overload, a problem which diminishes the productivity and quality of life of knowledge workers worldwide.”

The group was formed not too long ago by several researchers interested in the subject, and it has gained quite a bit of attention recently because of a New York Times cover story.

We took a trip up to Times Square to join several big and small companies such as IBM, Morgan Stanley, Seriosity and Basex to learn more about the problem of information overload and discuss possible solutions and best practices.

Most of the time, the discussion centered on email and interruptions, such as phone calls and IM requests. Not surprisingly, some of the numbers that came up in the presentations illustrated just how big the issue is. For example, an average executive at Morgan Stanley receives upwards of 500 emails a day. And according to Nathan Zelder at Intel, an average knowledge worker loses 6 hours per week when switching between tasks, the so-called “context-switch”.

From our experience here at Slife Labs, one of the difficulties that people have when they work in front of a computer all day is that when they hit a bump in their workflow, blogs, YouTube, games and much more are just a click away. Ten minutes here and there represent a big chunk of time at the end of the day and that leads to loss of productivity and frustration. I would argue that this is due to information overload as well, but these sorts of self-inflicted interruptions were not covered too much in the event.

Overall, a good gathering and we will continue to follow all the developments in this space very closely. For more details, quotes and numbers, you can check an extensive blog post from Jared Goralnick, who participated in the event and is working on an interesting email tool called AwayFind.

If you have any suggestions of how we can improve Slife to help you deal with the problem of information overload and productivity, let us know. Curious Slife Labs minds would like to know.

Back in April we announced that we would discontinue Slifeshare within a couple of months. Well, today is the day. If you try to hit Slifeshare from now on, you will be redirected to the Slife Labs home page.

As we mentioned in the April post, Slifeshare started as an experiment and broke new ground in the space of lifestreaming. When it launched a year and a half ago, Twitter hadn’t reached escape velocity yet and Friendfeed wasn’t even on the map. So much has changed since then.

For those of you who tried and enjoyed Slifeshare, a big thank you. When we started Slife Labs, we decided to call it “Labs” because we wanted to be experimental and try different things, different ideas, with the expectation that some of them would stick and others wouldn’t.

Slifeshare didn’t stick but we are applying everything we learnt from it into new products, such as Slife 2.0 and Slife Teams, and make them even better. So it’s all good.

It’s been one week since we released Slife 2.0. For us, there is a lot of work leading up to a release and perhaps even more after the release but we couldn’t be more pleased with how Slife 2.0 turned out and what’s coming up next.

Thanks to the quantity and quality of the feedback we’ve received over the last few days, we are already at work on a 2.0 revision. There are a number of requests in the forum that we can easily address, so you should expect to see an update to Slife fairly soon. By the way, the forum has been really active and it’s a great resource if you have a question about the app or would like to learn more about it.

There’s also been a lot of interest in Slife Teams over the past week. If you are still waiting for your Slife Teams invite account, no worries - we are beginning to send invitations today and will be opening the service to everyone very soon.

One question we’ve been asked a few times since we officially released Slife 2.0 yesterday is, ‘What if I bought a Slife license recently? Can I get a refund, since Slife is now free?’.

And our answer is, ‘Absolutely!’

So, If you’ve bought a license within the last 30 days, get in touch with us and we will be happy to give you a refund. We can either refund your credit card or get you an iTunes gift card.

Imagine the following scenario. You are a designer in a small graphics design shop, working with another 4 or 5 people on various client projects. In order to correctly bill clients for the work that your team does, everyone needs to manually log their time using a web-based time tracking tool. You and everyone consider time tracking a not-so-great aspect of the job.

Here’s another scenario. You are part of a large team, in a large company. As a result of the company size, communication is often a challenge and you feel that you never know what some of the other people in your own team are doing, or working on. To promote more communication, your company recently set up an internal blog and wiki, but those are never kept up-to-date since people don’t take the time to “document” their activities on a regular basis.

Do these scenarios sound familiar?

We are excited to announce that in addition to Slife 2.0, we are also releasing a time and activity management solution for groups and businesses today. It’s called Slife Teams and it’s a subscription-based web service.

The two scenarios above describe the problems that Slife Teams is addressing. There’s no need to manually track time against projects if your computer and the computers of your co-workers can do the work for you automatically. Stop shuffling digital paper and stay focused on the job, on what you love to do, which I bet is not time and activity tracking!

Slife Teams is really unique in that it’s completely based on the Slife client. Slife 2.0 lets you track your time and activities at the individual level. Slife Teams extends that to the whole team. It aggregates activities coming from multiple Slife applications into a straightforward web dashboard. It’s a little bit like Google Analytics for your team’s time and activities.

During the early stages, we are keeping Slife Teams invite-only and free. If you would like to get an invite, or learn more about Slife Teams, just get in touch with us. We are planning to slowly open up the service to more people. Over the next few weeks we will be providing more details regarding pricing as well.

Slife Teams is compatible with Slife 2.0 on the Mac and will be compatible with Slife 2.0 on Windows, when it ships later this year (more details on that soon).

How did the Slife 2.0 project get started?

The Slife 2.0 journey started back in November 2007. Back then, we got in touch with a large number of our users and discovered that while Slife was a fun app, it wasn’t as useful as people had hoped. Most people were using Slife as a time tracking tool and Slife left a lot to be desired in that department. That wasn’t too surprising to us, since Slife wasn’t conceived to help people keep track of their time. It was originally designed as a personal information management tool.

So, we looked at each other, took a deep breath and realized that we had to dive head first into a complete Slife redesign if the app was to remain useful to people. And we did exactly that, putting many other initiatives on hold, such as Slife for Windows and Slifeshare. Slife for the Mac is our bread & butter and we felt that we had to get it completely right.

The great benefit of starting from scratch was that we were able to build Slife on top of many new Apple technologies that simply weren’t available the first time Slife was developed, back when it was called Onlife. Many of these new technologies, such as Core Data, offer tremendous benefits in terms of performance, one of the areas where Slife was lacking. At the end of the day Slife 2.0 is a more compact and focused app, and it represents a huge improvement over previous versions.

Like with any other software application, there are many ways to make Slife 2.0 even better. Over the next few months we will continue to improve it, and we would like the community to be an integral part of the process. If you would like to participate, join the discussion! We would love to hear from you.

After many months of hard work by us and an outstanding group of collaborators and beta testers, it’s very exciting to say that Slife 2.0 for the Mac is available for download. If you are running MacOS X 10.5, take it for a test-drive, I think you will really like it!

Slife 2.0 includes a simpler, cleaner user interface, automatic application tracking without the need for plugins, 6 visualizations for activity analytics, advanced privacy controls, activity groups, productivity management through goals and notifications and more.

The release of Slife 2.0 is a big milestone for us, particularly because we’ve been waiting for it to make some big announcements. The first one is about the Slife application itself. Ready? Ok, from now on, Slife is completely free. You will no longer need a license to track applications or anything. Totally free.

As part of this release, we took a good look at our business and decided to change our approach. Instead of charging users for the Slife app, what we will do from now on is offer Slife for free and create additional services around it. Some of those services will be free, while others will be subscription-based. Some will be focused on end-users, some will be more business-oriented.

The way we see it, there are so many possibilities in the space of activity and productivity tracking that we don’t need to charge for the Slife client. That is one of the benefits of being a small, independent software company - we don’t need to bring home a bazillion dollars to be successful. And best of all, Slife becomes a free resource to anyone who needs it.

So, give Slife a shot and let us know what you think. If you are wondering about Slife 2.0 for Windows, we will have more details on that soon. But the short answer is yes, it’s coming!