Staction: Another Run At Workstreaming
I got pinged by the folks at Paste Interactive that they were launching a new app called Staction. The email was written in a way that would suggest that I had been part of the beta, but this was the first look I had gotten.
Staction is a work-oriented streaming application, like Present.ly or Yammer. However, it’s market orientation seems more in line with applications like Basecamp and Harvest, focused on the legions of freelancers and consultants looking for better ways to manage their time and coordinate work.
Staction is based on an extremely minimal design footprint.
Staction, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
The three main elements are the navigational area at the upper left, the stream in the center, and the right is a control panel.
The stream works in a way that follows the Twitter model. The user types in the message box, and hits enter to post messages. The second text box, just below the message area, is the so-called ‘meta box’ in which various sorts of metadata may be entered. In particular certain keywords and other information lead to semantic actions. For example, typing another user’s name will direct the message to their attention, or typing the name of a project will associate the message with a defined project. Typing ‘task’ leads to the creation of a to do item, with associated check box. Typing something like ‘1:00’ leads to time tracking. These may be compbined, so you could typed ‘design on the Jones presentation’ in the message field, and then ‘jones, 2;30’ in the meta box, tracking 2.5 hours of work on that task, in the Jones project. Likewise, arbitrary tags can be added to the meta box, like ‘design’, and searched for. Lastly, files can be attached to posts, by typing ‘file’ in the meta box, leading to an upload. (I couldn’t get more than one file to attach to a post, but there was no error message, so I don’t know what’s going on there.)
The Nav bar allows the user to access other sorts of information, like project reports.
Staction, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
These display the current status on projects, including the number of hours that have been applied. Their is no accounting going on, at present, so this doesn’t get converted to dollars, or invoices, but it seems like a logical direction for Paste to head in. Also, access to the project can be controlled here, so that users’ access can be limited to the projects they need to know about.
Other Nav elements access account and profile info — like name and avatar — as well as the means to add new people to projects and so forth.
On the right hand side the control pane displays the user’s pending tasks. These can be dragged around to represent a priority. The large clockish box in the upper right displays the number of hours posted on all tasks during the day.
All of this meta data is fodder for filtering. The People and Project tabs expand to show projects and people in place of the list of tasks, when pressed. Clicking on a specific person or project filters the stream to show only those posts that match. The Saved Views tab displays a list of saved views, which are created on the stream using the ‘sort this view’ control. A cumulative filtering based on various search fields can be defined — ‘all uncompleted tasks by Stowe’ or ‘all time info on the Jones project’ or ‘all messages with files attached for the Jones project’ — and these can be saved for easy access.
Staction supports RSS for people, projects, and all saved views as well.
Limitations
Personally, I don’t want to get so minimal that I can’t format messages, and Staction doesn’t allow me to write something like this post in the messages it supports. It doesn’t even support newlines to break a message into paragraphs. The alternative, I guess, is to write a document and attach that to a post, but that seems like a step backward for me. I would recommend that they support HTML, Textile, and Smartypants markup for the posts, and that would solve my primary objection to using Staction. (Note: Present.ly ‘solved’ this problem by allowing an arbitrarily long text object to be associated with every post, but I still dislike the ‘on the side’ feel of that approach.)
I also begrudge the lack of an intrinsic notion of links, and since HTML is not supported in the body of messages I can’t create one manually.
While Staction allows arbitrary tags to be used, and searched for, the tags aren’t displayed in the stream, even when the ‘more’ is clicked to show other metadata and the ‘edit’ and ‘delete’ controls. I would suggest an additional tab in the control panel for ‘Tags’ like People and Projects.
Bottom Line
I find a lot to like with Staction, and if they were to fix the limitations I have noted, I would certainly adopt it as a competitor to Basecamp, Yammer, and Present.ly, none of which meets my needs at present.
