I decided to take a close hands-on look at Present.ly, another of the legion of would-be 'Twitter for the Enterprise' competitors that have emerged in recent months.
The bottom line: Present.ly appears to be ready to meet the challenges of a streaming application for the enterprise.
A Deep Dive
As my recent report on QikCom demonstrates, assessing a would-be enterprise microstreaming application involves a lot of work.
In the case of Present.ly, I was interested at the outset whether the tool would allow me to invite users with arbitrary email addresses (since Yammer does not). Present.ly does indeed support arbitrary email address for invitees, but it goes further. Invitations can be open for any with the company's base email address (the 'domain' option, below), a code can be created and distributed to a group of people to speed up invitations (the 'access code' option), the account can be totally open so that anyone can join (the 'open' option), or it can be closed, requiring the administrator to invite users one by one ('closed'). In my circustances, I opted for closed.
Messaging
The principal activity in a microstreaming is reading and writing messages, but in the case of an enterprise solution with an open context, and the possibility of closed groups, there should be a clear differentiation between different sorts of messages. As shown below, messages created in or directed to a closed group ('Open Enterprise 2009' in this case) are highlighted in pinkish orange, as are direct messages, which are supported by the 'd username' convention of twitter. The '@username' convention is adopted from Twitter for posting a message in the open for the attention of a specific person.
On the right of the screenshot above you see that the short 140 character messages can have a functionally unlimited text field attached, and this text can be marked up or managed in various ways, like formatted text (conserves line breaks, but not other formatting at this time), textile and markup, or as various sorts of programming code. The variety of code types suggests that Present.ly is targeting its solution toward the development community.
I tried formatting attached text in textile, because I have used that feature in the past with Backpack and Basecamp, especially for simple lists, bolding, and tables. In this text I used the '|' notation to make simple tables; much easier that the HTML equivalent:
The result wasn't that wonderful, though. There should clearly be better styling of the table so that more padding is provided.
Perhaps much more powerful is the option to attach files to posts. Here's a message with a graphics file -- my avatar -- attached:
Once attached, there isn't much you can do with files: there is no Files tab where they can be managed, deleted or updated, as you can in Basecamp, for example. And at the moment, they can't even be deleted. And neither can messages, it turns out. You can delete users, and you can delete groups, but not individual messages. This is a major glitch. You also can't edit messages, or the attached text objects, at the moment, which is a major annoyance converging on bug status.
There is also an button to shorten URLs, but it turned 'http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/stowe-boyd-front-man-for-.html' into 'https://edgewards.presentlyapp.com/s/at' which is only slightly shorter. I think I will stick with Bit.ly (they may want to integrate it).
Groups
Creating groups is straightforward: there can be open to any users in the company account, or closed, meaning people have to be invited. Also, groups can be published in the company directory of groups or not. So secret and closed groups are possible.
Once groups are created, messages can be directed to them using the '@groupname' or 'd groupname' approach. I tested it and a user who is not a member of a group can send a dm to one, which raises some questions: since the group in question was nomincally closed and secret, it might be better if a 'no such group' error message was returned, even if in fact the message is sent.
In general, however, this means that a users can be working in the default 'Home' feed, and create or respond to messages for groups that they belong to, as in 'd oe09 @olivermarks How about lunch on Tuesday?'. This last example is a good one because it demonstrates a few subtle features. The 'd oe09' directs a private message to the 'oe09' group. Once within that group, the '@olivermarks' denotes that the message is directed specifically to olivermarks, although any other members of the group can see it as well. Lastly, the question mark is picked up by Presnt.ly and handled in a special way. A message with a question mark in it is considered a question: a special sort of message. Present.ly also treats a few other sorts of messages specially: tagged messages, system broadcasts, and urgent messages. Each of these has its own subtab under the 'Browse' tab, and each has different sorts of use.
Questions
Questions, with the distinctive question mark in the background, are supposed to lead to answers. If you look at the question a few down in the list below, you will see that a question posted by @stoweboyd awaits an answer from the user I had logged is as, @junior.
If @junior answers @stoweboyd's question, and then clicks on the 'view' link in the post, the following sort of threaded presentation is shown:
In this case, @junior answered the question publicly, but also answered a second time, privately. This sort of private/public answering of public questions is very rich. Note that questions can be private, or one-to-one, as well.
Urgent
Any message that ends with '!!!' is treated as urgent, with a distinctive exclamation mark in the background.
System Broadcast
Any message starting with 'b ' is a system broadcast and is shown to everyone, as well as appearing the that tab under Browse.
Tagged Messages
Present.ly has adopted the hashtag convention from Twitter, so all posts with hastags, like '#planning' or '#tasks' will show under the Tags tab. All tags are search tools, and clicking on them shows all messages that share the clicked on tag. At this time there doesn't seem to be a place to display or manage tags, aside from a tag cloud in the Tags page.
People
Users have short profiles, and the following/followers model is carried over from Twitter.
Twitter Cross Posting
A limited form of Twitter integration is supported: any message with 't! ' at the start -- like 't! going for lunch and a long walk' -- will be posted to Twitter once you have set up your settings to login on your behalf.
Here's an Update -- a simple way to post a new message no matter where you are in the app -- cross posting to Twitter.
Strangely enough, the post in Twitter did no refer to Present.ly at all, saying it had been posted 'via the web'.
Notifications
In principle, Present.ly will notify users of various sorts of things in various sorts of ways. Most importantly, there is an interface for SMS, but try as I might, I could never get it to send the verification message to my phone. I did get IM notifications working however.
Here's my Gtalk alerts:
Desktop Clients
The website doesn't have much to say on this topic, although I did find this post at the Present.ly blog which shows how you can make a version of Twitterrific that accesses the twitter API that Present.ly supports. I did it, and, presto:
And the round trip works as well: I posted from the Twitterrific client back to Present.ly, no problem.
Conclusions
I haven't played with Present.ly long enough to say anything about performance or scaling. But aside from a few small glitches -- notification via SMS to my phone just doesn't happen, for example -- the app works in obvious, straightforward and sensible fashion. I didn't encounter very many issues that I would consider bugs, except for the SMS bottleneck.
It will take longer to determine if I can use Present.ly in a productive fashion for my sort of usage pattern -- lots of long-term projects, very firewalled, with non-overlapping groups of people from differen companies. But I think I am an edge case, and the normal pattern of use is one in which a great deal of activity will be taking place in the Company stream, not 99% in closed private groups.
Nonetheless, I believe that Present.ly will be ready for enterprise use, at least for businesses of hundreds of staff, and maybe for larger ones, by the end of the 60 day evaluation cycle for any one signing up today. I am betting that they will figure out how to delete messages, and support editing of messages and text attachments, all in short order.
The price point is reasonable, too --
-- although I got finessed in the process of evaluation. There is a 60 day free trial. I signed up for the free account, and relatively quickly had to upgrade to a larger account, because I invited more that five users. Next thing you know, I had to get out my credit card, and was charged $14 starting today! Basically lost the 60 days free trial. So be sure to sign up for a 60 day trial with a large number of users.
Would you like to try out Akibot? www.akibot.com
Same concept but incorporates artificial intelligence...
Posted by: Marcelo | August 18, 2009 at 11:02 AM