It’s great to see that Alina Dizik is reviewing Slife in The Wall Street’s Cranky Consumer column today. She does bring up a few things that we are hoping to improve, such as being able to sign-up without a credit card, among other things that we would like to address.
We are planning to bring a number of changes to the Slife platform in 2010. The key goal is simplicity. We are still finalizing all the details and hope to reveal our grand plan soon.
You may have noticed that we’ve been quiet here recently. That’s because we’ve been busy working on some improvements for the Slife client and also the web applications (Slife Web/Teams). We hope to push out a new release in the first week of December.
We are also about to enter holiday territory, first with Thanksgiving and then later in December with Christmas. The pace of business is slowing down.
The closeness to a new year and the aforementioned slow down make this an ideal time for planning, and this is what we are going to do for a large part of December. And take a well deserved week of rest, of course.
Until you hear from us again, which shouldn’t be too long from now, Happy Thanksgiving!
For those of you who were wondering about our server transition, I am happy to say that we’ve just installed our very last configuration script. We are now done!
Of course, there might be a hiccup here and there, but overall the entire upgrade went very smoothly. Why did it take so long, you might ask? Our goal was to complete the transition by the end of September. We started the whole process early and gave ourselves plenty of time for testing and debugging. It worked out really well.
It’s wonderful to be done with this and get back to what’s really exciting to us – improving our products. Not too long from now we will be releasing a couple of very useful features to Slife Web and a new Slife Teams revision.
It’s time to boost up the server capacity and flexibility of our server infrastructure. We couldn’t be happier about this work. It’s a sign that more and more people are using Slife, to the point that we need more juice in the machines.
Over the next week we will be transferring our sites and applications to a cloud based environment. We are staying with Rackspace, since they’ve been very good to us in the past.
So, what does this mean to you? If you try to access your Slife Web dashboard, our home page or any other part of our site and have trouble, it’s most likely because of this transition. We will do our best to keep all disruptions to a minimum.
As per usual, feel free to ping us or email (support at slife labs).
It’s usually at the beginning of September when you can really tell that Summer is almost over. Kids are back in school, the swimming pools close, and the leaves start their transition from solid green to red and then yellow.
In order to soak it all in before it’s too late, we will be taking a little break. When we come back, we will have updates on Slife Web, the open source Slife client and more. See you in a week!
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that we were putting the final touches on a small ad campaign to promote Slife among designers, developers and other creative professionals. The ad has been running on two sites, Web Worker Daily and Smashing Magazine:
So far we haven’t noticed a significant uptake in subscriptions due to these ads. On the other hand, they are certainly getting the word out about us, which is a good thing. Let’s see how the next couple of weeks unfold.
For the last year and a half or so, we’ve been using Get Satisfaction to power the Slife Labs forum. If you go to our community page on the site, you will see that it has engaged hundreds of Slife users in very productive conversations with us. It does work, and is pretty cool.
However, from time to time we hear from some of you that the Get Satisfaction interface is not what you would like to use. So, with that in mind, we set out on a small journey to find out what others options are available out there in the community and forum software space.
As it turns out, there are some great options. The one we liked the most is called Tender and is designed by a very talented group of people up in Portland. We even created an account and started playing with it. It looks great and seems very simple, straightforward to use.
Now comes the question to you. We are considering leaving Get Satisfaction and using Tender from now on. The obvious downside is that we probably wouldn’t be able to move all the GS discussions over to Tender. But we would be moving to a great forum platform, that would be all about Slife Labs.
What do you think? Are you getting enough satisfaction in our forums or would like to see a change? Since this is about what the community prefers, your input is key. Let us know.
Welcome to 2009. We hope you have an excellent and prosperous new year. It’s been a few weeks since the last blog post, so a quick update on the state of Slife Labs is in order.
2009 is going to be an important year for us, as we continue to refine the Slife platform and our business model. In 2008, most of our resources were dedicated to development – we built Slife 2.0 (Mac and Windows) and Slife Teams.
This year we plan to promote Slife a lot more and get the word out about what it can do, especially with regards to Slife Teams. We believe Slife Teams is a great solution for activity analytics and we hope to work with partners and consultants to distribute it.
From a development point of view, one of our key goals for 2009 is to shorten the release cycle for our products. This is something we’ve had as a goal in the past, and we get better at it all the time. Ideally we would like to release updates every couple of months. Right now we are back at work putting the finishing touches on a new release of Slife for Mac and continuing with the beta program for Slife Teams. By the end of the month, Slife v2.1 should be available for download with improvements and some new features.
Also, we will be in San Francisco during MacWorld and presenting at the Silicon Valley Mac User Group on January 12th. If you happen to be in the area, please drop by – we would love to meet you.
You might have noticed how quiet the Slife Labs blog was over the last few weeks. The reason for that is because we were working really hard on a whole new push for Slife and Slife Teams.
Today we are really excited to announce the release of the Slife 2.0 Platform. In addition to an update to the Slife Mac client, we are also releasing Slife for Windows and Slife Teams.
Let’s dive in a little deeper and look at each product one by one.
The Slife 2.0 client for MacOS X has been available for free for the past 4 months or so. It’s been really popular and we are very pleased that so many people have found it useful and incorporated it in their ‘digital’ lives. Today, we are releasing an update, v2.0.2, that addresses a few issues and makes it fully compatible with Slife Teams. This is a minor release, and we are planning a v2.1 update in a few weeks that will include new features and bring together some of the feedback we got from users over the last several months.
After a long period of beta testing, Slife v2.0 for Windows is also out of the gates today. It’s very similar to the Slife client for the Mac, and includes an almost identical feature set. You can create ‘Activities’ to aggregate your computer interactions, view your computer usage by application, documents and much more. Like the Mac version, it’s also completely free.
Slife Teams is a new team-based communication and activity analytics web service that we introduced a few months ago. It works alongside the Slife client and is a great way for workgroups to keep track of their collective activities. Until now, we’ve been testing it extensively with invite users and teams, and today we are opening the service to everyone. Teams is a subscription-based service, based on the number of users on your team – $10 user/month. But you can create your account and try it for free for 30 days. You can find out more details on the Slife Teams site.
On top of the software releases, you will also notice that we’ve updated the look of the web site a bit and also made available a few new help resources. We’ve just published three short user guides, one for Slife Mac, one for Slife Windows and one for Slife Teams. They are meant to serve as an introduction to these products, describing in more detail how to set up activities, interpret the visualizations, configure Slife Teams, etc. We will be improving the guides as we move forward.
As always, we would love to know what you think about our new products and initiatives. Your feedback has been instrumental in the development of Slife until now and we can’t wait to make the Slife Platform 2.0 even better and more relevant to your needs.
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.