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When was your “Aha!” moment?

It’s not always necessarily intuitive what an app’s exact purpose is right away, especially when it comes to an app like Glassboard. We built the app with the intention of not just small business teams using the app, but also families and friends: anyone who would want to communicate in a small, private group. Because there is a broad audience, it’s not obvious on the first run of the app what you’re supposed to do with it.

It’s often that I’ll read (via Twitter, or our support channel) people commenting that they’ve downloaded the app and created an account. Now what? It looks nice and all, they can upload photos and send messages out into the ether, but unlike Twitter or Facebook, who sees any of it? Where are all my friends?

In our Sepia Labs board, Brent Simmons pointed out that for a lot of people he’s talked to about Glassboard, they didn’t quite understand what it was really for until they used it at a conference. These folks had been invited to a board dedicated to the conference, and in there they saw ongoing discussions of sessions people attended. They could also see people making plans for things to do once the conference had ended for the day. The app suddenly became useful to them. They began to see how they could use it outside the conference with their families or colleagues. That was their “Aha!” moment.

Even though I’m on the Sepia Labs team and I’ve used the app since the very beginning, I didn’t have my “Aha!” moment until a couple months later, when I created a board devoted to live music with my friends. It’s one thing to work on an app where you can tout its utility because of this or that feature, it’s another thing entirely when you arrive at seeing how beneficial the app is in your real life. Once I experienced that moment, I came to trust that Glassboard could accommodate many different people and situations. Honestly I can’t go a day without using it!

Posted by Jenny Blumberg

Class (board) is in session!

We were first alerted to Glassboard’s utility in the classroom when I had a conversation with Micah Humphrey’s, college professor. He used the app with his Agroecology (soil and crop science) class to take attendance and make announcements, among other things.

Now we’re seeing more educators making it clear that Glassboard is a great tool for teaching. This history blog touts Glassboard as useful for small groups of students to have discussions and study together. This teacher is using Glassboard as a means to gather feedback from students for an assignment.

There are a few reasons, as I see it, that are driving this education-focused adoption of Glassboard:

1. The privacy aspect.

Glassboard in inherently private and always has been. For educators and parents, this is a critical feature for keeping students safe and focused.

2. Glassboard isn’t just another social network, it’s a resource so teams can get things done more effectively.

Can you think of many students who would want to friend their teachers on Facebook? I sure can’t. Since Glassboard is so easy to sign up for, teachers can get their students on to a class board in a matter of minutes and the discussion can continue to take place outside of the other networks that everyone uses for social pursuits.

3. Educators, as chairperson of a board, are empowered as moderators.

Since a chairperson can control who has access to the board, as well as the ability to delete posts made by others, Glassboard is easily moderated by the teacher. Also, once a class or a project is complete they can choose to delete a board and start over fresh with a new crop of students.

4. Technology is infiltrating the classroom!

More and more, students are gaining access to iPads and other technologies to enhance learning. As this approach grows in popularity, so too will apps that enable learning. With Glassboard as a discussion tool in the classroom, students are better able to communicate with educators and their peers.

Our Android developer, Nick Bradbury, shares his thoughts on this trend:
“It’s definitely been a boost for both my kids (my daughter started at the same school this year). My kids are exposed to a *much* more visual way of learning, which I think is far better than the way I learned. Instead of staring at static text books, they’re able to learn from interactive examples. In class, teachers project their iPads onto a SmartBoard, which enables them to display online video without the hassle of the projectors we grew up with. Most of their assignments are completed and submitted on their iPads.

They’re using Pages, iMovie and similar apps to create documents and multimedia presentations that are easily shared with other classmates. Some of these projects are team-based, but quite often they don’t need to get together to complete their work – they just do it online from home. One of the coolest things was my son’s Spanish class, where the teacher had “tagged” dozens of objects around the room. The kids aimed their iPhone cameras at the objects, and the Spanish name of the objects appeared on-screen (aim it at a chair, and see the Spanish word for chair).”

Viva la silla!

Posted by Jenny Blumberg

Glassboard for iPhone 5 and Kindle

I don’t need to tell you how awesome our team of developers are (I’ll show you!).

With the iPhone 5 being released last Friday, our iOS developer Brent Simmons had a new version of Glassboard for the larger screen ready and in the iTunes store on Monday. That was fast!

Our Android developer, Nick Bradbury, has now ensured that Kindle users can enjoy the Glassboard experience. Glassboard is now available in the Amazon app store.

Thanks guys!

Posted by Jenny Blumberg

Glassboard 2.3: Now with deletion!

Finally! The most asked for feature is now available in Glassboard: you can delete your messages and comments from the mobile apps. If you are a board chair, you can delete messages and comments from others as well.

For any comment or message that you would like to retract, simply long-press and the pop-up menu will give you the option to delete. Its easy.

Nick Bradbury, our Android dev, goes into some background behind our reasoning (including why we didn’t include deletion in the first place.

There are other additions to the app in this version, of course, including performance enhancements, but message/comment deletion is what we’re most excited about!

Download Glassboard for iPhone

Download Glassboard for Android

Posted by Jenny Blumberg

Simplicity as a feature

What makes a mobile app easy to use, intuitive, and delightful? In a word, simplicity. When we were in the planning stages of Glassboard, our goal was to make it as easy as possible to communicate with small groups.

The Glassboard team has always agreed on one thing: make the app simple. In fact, this philosophy has been touted by both our iPhone and Android developers in years past, what with this interview with Brent Simmons on learning to be “ruthless about simplicity” and Nick Bradbury on his blog sharing his experience with implementing simplicity in his software.

Which is why when it came down to what features to include in 1.0, and subsequently 2.0, we did a lot of cutting. In fact our biggest priorities for major releases has been to make the app better looking and faster. Adding features at times was an afterthought. A lot of mobile collaboration apps have some great features such as lists, calendaring, and polling. I’m not saying we won’t ever include anything like those in Glassboard, I’m just saying it’s more important to us to give you a simple way to communicate. All the bells and whistles are nice, but we’d like to have a solid base to build those on.

Another factor that we’ve often mentioned is the privacy settings in Glassboard. There aren’t any because it is always private. Although Facebook and Google+ provide a way to collaborate as a group privately, there are a number of steps to be taken to do so. In fact, this post about bringing G+ to the workplace inspired me to write this: although G+ is loaded with features for collaboration, one has to take an extra step to ensure privacy within a group.

If you find Glassboard to be wonderfully simple, yet effective and screaming fast, we’ve done our job. If you’d like to see more out of Glassboard, that’s great! We like to hear suggestions for what features to add. As long as we know what’s most important to you, that’s what we’ll look towards adding next.

Posted by Jenny Blumberg

Our lives in pictures

Photo sharing is essential for any social network to thrive. Facebook apparently has 90 billion total photos. 90 BILLION!

Why is that?

Simply put, our lives are told with pictures now. We can summarize our daily activities within the constrains of 160 characters, we can blog or post to Facebook, or we can share photographs.

Which is why social networks want to highlight photo sharing as a prominent feature. It’s the easiest way to tell stories, to share our thoughts and current events, and to engage people we know. Not only that, but with things like filters, tagging, and adding location, photo sharing has become streamlined and a lot more fun.

From the most mundane activities, like what you ate for dinner,

or pictures of your pup

to something spectacular that you’d like to share,

to something tender,

to something silly.

It’s not even a matter of saving these moments for later. Photo sharing has changed the way we experience events as they occur. It’s become very common that for every holiday, every concert, and every meal, people are constantly whipping out their phones to carefully document all that goes on in their lives. Which isn’t to say that’s a bad thing, it’s simply another way social networking has impacted our lives.

Posted by Jenny Blumberg

Introducing Glassboard Premium

Do you love Glassboard? Want more out of it? Want to pay us money?! Today we are proud to announce the introduction of Glassboard premium.

Glassboard premium was created to give you more of what you need from Glassboard – more storage, more boards, the ability to bookmark messages and much more, all for just $5/month.

Heard enough and ready to dive in already? Sign up now!

Now to introduce the goodies available in Glassboard premium!

Don’t forget that message, bookmark it!
We’ve been there. “Where is that one link? That message that I wanted to save?” No more scrolling through all of your board content to find that one important tidbit. Bookmarks will allow you to save a message or comment- forever if you’d like. Once you bookmark a message, it will always be available in your bookmarks.

Kinda like a yearbook, only shorter and more personal. Export that board!
Some boards have a shelf life of only a week, or maybe just a weekend. After that, we wanted to make it easy for you to share your collection of work with everyone – and now you can. Exporting a board will deliver your entire news feed into a web page that you can share with others, including all pictures and video. It includes every message, photo, video, comment and like for the life of the board so you can relive everything!

More Storage. Share the love.
As a premium member, you’ll jump from 100MB to 1GB of storage across all your boards. Yes, you read that right. All of your boards that you chair will get 1GB of storage. It’s not just you who benefits from this, everyone on your boards will benefit also, you snazzy photog you.

More Boards. A LOT more. Keeeep going…
Don’t run out of boards, ever, because now premium members can create an unlimited number of boards.

Keep the conversation going. Transfer board chair to someone else.
We know how it is. As the board chair you sometimes need to hand the reins over to someone else. Now you can. With Glassboard premium, you can transfer your board chair status over to any other premium board member in your board. Now they can WIELD THE POWAH.

Ready to become a Glassboard premium member to reap all of these benefits? Sign up here!

Do you have more questions about Glassboard premium? Talk to us!

Posted by Jenny Blumberg

Happy Birthday, Glassboard!

Today is Glassboard’s first birthday. Allow me to take this opportunity, on behalf of the Sepia Labs team, to thank every person that helped us get here. If it weren’t for all of the beta testers, evangelists, and people who provide feedback Glassboard wouldn’t be what it is today. Here’s looking forward to growing this great app together.

Cheers!

Posted by Jenny Blumberg

Stalker-free social networking

One of the things I like using our blog for is to address any concerns or questions people have and to set the record straight. A question I’ve seen quite a bit, both via Tweets addressed to us and our support channel, is “Why can’t I find people on Glassboard?”

First of all, I understand why people would want this feature. You join Glassboard, but where are all your friends? It’s what people have come to expect in social networking. It represents a shift in our culture because of Facebook, the expectation that you should be able to find anyone (and anyone can find you!) as long as you know minute details about them.

There are certain features of other social networks, like this element of discovery, that we as a team mulled over but eventually came to the conclusion that it simply does not jive with our approach to privacy in Glassboard.

This reminds me of all the Luddites in my life. My sister, a handful of my best friends, and my parents all do not have access to smart phones. If I need to reach them, I must know their phone number or email address. When we created Glassboard we intended for people to use the app with other people they knew well enough to have their contact information. Unfortunately this means you won’t be able to look up your high school sweetheart unless you’ve stayed in touch!

Posted by Jenny Blumberg

Android takes the lead!

This most recent quarter saw Android sales surging, enough that the popular smartphone company beat sales by Apple. Is this an indication of a shift in tastes in the smartphone market? Or perhaps iPhone fans are holding out until the iPhone 5 comes out?

Android phones sold more than double this past quarter than the same time last year. Which isn’t to say Apple is hurting: sales of iPhones are still growing as well. Read more information here.

Posted by Jenny Blumberg