There’s no lack of apps to communicate and collaborate with friends, family and colleagues. You use messaging apps such as Snapchat, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger to ping friends, and maybe team collaboration darling Slack at work. You’ve got document sharing apps and services such as Google Docs, Quip or Microsoft Office Mobile, Dropbox for storing files, maybe Evernote for quick notes, and oh-so-many calendars for your job, your family, and your kids' soccer teams. And of course there’s still email.
Whew. And therein lies the problem, says Ross Mayfield. The 44-year-old serial entrepreneur knows collaborative software, having co-founded Socialtext in 2002 to commercialize the seminal group-edited Web pages called wikis. Now, he believes that precisely because of the explosion of communications, collaboration, and productivity apps since then, there’s a need for a much more simple way to bring them all together. When Mayfield and his future wife were planning their wedding, for instance, he needed to use a wide array of apps and Web services to keep track of catering and location options, as well as arrange activities such as a wishing tree that required help from friends. The scattered nature of all those tools made it difficult for multiple people to use, especially on the go.
Today, Mayfield’s year-old startup, Pingpad, is launching a free app on Apple’s and Google’s app stores and a connected service on the Web that aims to elevate messaging into a way for people to get things done--and not just at work. Unlike at Socialtext and largely unlike most collaboration services all the way from Lotus Notes to Yammer to Slack, the nine-person company isn’t chiefly aimed at businesses. “We had a lot of innovation around collaboration in the 2000s,” he said in an interview in the makeshift upstairs office at his newly rented house near downtown Palo Alto. "But very little of it reached consumers."
Pingpad is intended to be a tool as simple and quick for anyone to use as messaging: a lightweight social network for getting things done all in one place. The app, which was still undergoing changes last week, features several categories of services, starting with the simple act of creating a note. Notes can be private or shared with particular contacts, who can be added with an email address or mobile phone number, so they can jointly edit the notes.
Groups of contacts also can be formed quickly. Each group also has a chat channel to discuss notes and share links (and eventually photos), and the chat messages can be saved as notes as well, making them less ephemeral than in most messaging apps. Finally, tasks can be assigned to group members. Mayfield calls the result “social productivity.”
Besides big events like weddings, Pingpad could be used to help people coordinate household chores, schedule errands, arrange carpools, plan vacations, host potluck dinners, and the like. One likely target is colleges, where the app would be useful for sharing class notes, coordinating study groups, arranging roommate tasks and movie nights, and serving as a hub for clubs and organizations. And although it’s not focused on big enterprises, Mayfield thinks Pingpad could attract workgroups or departments inside smaller companies.
Pingpad represents a change in the nature of online productivity and collaboration applications that’s developing as the mobile age matures. Many services and apps still have documents at the center of their services, a concept that retains the baggage of paper documents such as difficulty in group editing and formatting that makes viewing on mobile devices cumbersome. As messaging of various kinds has begun to replace email as the prime way to collaborate especially on mobile devices, Mayfield contends, the document will give way to quick messages that also can be saved, shared, and edited simply.
Already, messaging has started to become something of an atomic unit of many kinds of apps. Even non-messaging apps such as Uber, Instagram, Meerkat, Facebook, and Twitter are appealing in part because they have short messages at their core to make their services quick and easy to use. That has some experts comparing the impact of messaging to that of operating systems such as Microsoft’s Windows that serve as platforms for many applications. "We see messaging as the new OS--all sorts of activity will happen inside of it," says Marc Canter, co-founder of Cola, a messaging startup not quite ready to announce its service.
One big challenge faced by all new social apps is the cold start problem. They require people to find other people to use them before they become useful. This is why you probably don’t use WhatsApp if you’re older than 35: None of your friends do either. It’s also why Pingpad is aimed at first helping individuals create notes and lists for themselves, so it’s useful immediately even if friends or colleagues aren’t using it yet.
Mayfield is hopeful that if and when people do get others to use Pingpad, they will discover another benefit of the app: Discrete groups can be set up from among a single list of contacts, avoiding the need to set up and organize contacts in countless apps. “Being able to have identities that work across boundaries, which is increasingly how we work and live, is incredibly valuable,” says social software consultant Thomas Vander Wal, who has tried out Pingpad.
The wide range of potential uses puts Pingpad in competition at least superficially with parts of nearly every other app for communications and collaboration. But even if they're constantly invading each other's territory, most have fairly distinct purposes. Facebook and WhatsApp are more about casual chatter, not getting something done. Apps aimed at businesses, such as Slack and Yammer, work great for discussion but not for direct collaborative work on a document or task. And document editing apps such as Google Docs are overkill for many simple tasks.
Still, more direct competition may be coming. The file sharing service Box is adding collaboration tools, and on Monday, Drew Houston, CEO of file storage service Dropbox, signaled an intention to create more of a complete collaboration platform. "We think about how do we remove friction from all these everyday things you’re doing," Houston said. At the same conference in San Francisco where Houston spoke, TechCrunch Disrupt, a startup called SamePage unveiled an app and Web service that allows people to combine a wide array of other services such as Google Docs and Box with chat all on one page. “The collaboration problem is not yet solved,” says SamePage CEO Scott Schreiman. The upshot, says Brian Blau, research director at Gartner: “There’s going to be lots of these kinds of apps.”
Pingpad has raised about $1 million in a seed financing round from 500 Startups, CrunchFund, Greylock Partners, Floodgate Fund, and a raft of angel investors. Eventually, Mayfield plans to make money from add-on services such as greater data storage and more tools to manage groups. For now, though, the priority is proving that even in a world bursting with social apps, people still need a better way to collaborate not just at their job but in the rest of their life.
