Tag Archives: Instant messaging

Siosus

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Siosus is a free total online sharing and collaboration workspace.  The free basic package includes unlimited workspaces and unlimited number of members.  

Siosus homepage

Siosus homepage

Tools that are included in the free basic package are useful and extensive:

  • Contacts and group manager
  • Custom workspace
  • Manage your files
  • Calendars and events
  • Blogs
  • Discussions
  • Chat and IM
  • RSS feeds
  • Web database management
  • Project management
  • Task automation
  • Permissioning 
What's included?

What's included

The drawbacks are that there are limits to the free package:

  • Only 25MB free storage
  • Advertising appears on your homepage
  • Only 200 MB monthly transfer
  • 10Mb file size upload limit

 There are three upgrades that increase all of the storage/transfer/upload options and give better support; however they cost from US$15 to US$100 per month.

Upgrade options

Upgrade options

Siosus does appear to be just about the total package when it comes to sharing and collaborating with colleagues who are sitting next to you or on the other side of the world. However, limits will affect the efficacy of the free package. It all depends on how much space you actually need to use.  

Siosus is the platform chosen by James Henri and Sandra Lee to run the Your School Library online conference.

Plurk

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Plurk is a tool that enables members to have an online social conversation with multiple friends. You can join conversations by topic, or use the micro blogging tool to send ‘plurks’ which use a maximum of 140 characters (like Twitter). Updates from friends are shown on your page as a timeline in chronological order.

Homepage

Homepage

Plurk’s aim is to introduce a balance between blogs and wikis, instant messaging and email. Users of the micro blogging tool use verbs to explain how they are feeling.

Example

Example

There is a great wiki that lists schools and other educational institutions that are using Plurk. The wiki provides links to the projects that the schools are undertaking, and currently there are at least seven Australian schools, with three of those from Victoria. Many of the projects linked to the wiki are outstanding and definitely worth investigating. If you like the sound of Plurk and you’d like to learn more about how it works, click here.

Twitter – a quick communication tool

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Twitter is a ‘micro-blogging’ tool that lets you send and receive short messages. Tweets, or messages, contain no more than 140 characters including punctuation and spaces, so messages have to be short and sweet. The information you send in your message is meant to answer the question, ‘What are you doing?’ 

Twitter
Twitter

You can invite contacts to join Twitter and you can decide who can read your updates. Your updates can be displayed on your Twitter homepage, sent via email, instant messaging, RSS, (SMS but this is currently only available in USA, Canada, UK and India) and to Facebook pages. You can also set Twitter to ‘quiet time’ when you don’t want to be interrupted, or you’re just sick of being able to be contacted all of the time.

Twitter could be a useful tool for colleagues working together in different locations, or for students collaborating on projects.  Other applications such as authoring tools, mashups, search engines and voice to Twitter (Twitterfone) have been developed to complement Twitter. However, not all of the applications have been devised by the people behind Twitter. The Twitter Blog is a useful tool that lists a range of Twitter applications. The blog keeps up to date with what’s hot and it also provides a dictionary of ‘Twitter lingo’.