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4 Ways to Share Content Stinkin’ Quick, The Best and How They’ll Totally Advance CAD/PLM

by Josh on June 29, 2009 · Comments

How many ways do you think there are to share content online? hundreds? thousands? Who cares, cause we’ve boiled it down to four. Exactly four sites that are changing how people post content and interact online?

Not only are these the coolest places to be online nowadays, they’re the quickest and most versatile ways to put up your thoughts, consolidate your social activity and post just about any kind of media you want people to know about. So, get your amazing food mold photos and thoughts on abolishing insect repellent together, you’re about to go post.

Why the four?
There’s a lot of ways to put crapalicious meaningful content online. However, there’s only a few really good ways to enjoy doing it while having it all make sense. Whether you’re just wondering about posting content online or consolidating how you already do it, these are bound to interest you.

I’d also like to add, there’s a direction content distribution on the web seems to be drifting mindlessly toward. There are types of real-time aspects creeping in, but this is just one feature of what browsers and web apps will apply toward the continuous streams of online content generated each day. These are four that are showing the types of features being added to applications development and content distribution. They’re not perfect, but they’re ones to get familiar with.

These four below would currently be considered blog or micro-blogging sites or platforms, but in actuality, they’re more like thought-streaming or content-streaming apps. They allow you to put content online in different ways, and likewise share it in different ways. Here’s the crew of them. While they’re separate apps, you’ll notice when you get into them, that they have features which allow them to work together.

FriendFeed

FriendFeed is real-time content being delivered as fast as you can create it. You can see the content streaming in real-time on the public discussion page. This seems a bit noisy , I agree, but the value is on the people you connect with and the other features like consolidating all your social site activity, posting via email, document attachment, groups, threaded comments, and great bookmarklet, widgets and other tools.

Posterous

Posterous is making it extremely easy to post content online as well as consolidate your activity. The great features Posterous has are being able to auto-post to your other social sites, like Twitter, Facebook, etc., post via email and have as many Posterous sites as you like on one account. You can also subscribe to other Posterous users.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a lot like Posterous with not as much a focus on distributing your content to other sites. They have an incredibly easy interface to use, a lot of tools, widgets and a third-party developer site which allows you to extend the ways you use Tumblr. You can also follow people and create as many blogs as you like on one account.

Wordpress.com

Wordpress is one more will be familiar with. It’s a full blog platform that allows you to quickly customize the site and post content. The integration doesn’t work quite the same, but since it uses RSS you can link it to other sites. Wordpress has an extremely strong community, lots of development and many ways to customize.

Which is best?
These are all the range of web apps currently out that are pushing web technology in the area of content distribution. They don’t create or organize the media for you, they’re simply an outlet for all the stuff you want to get off your head. The best for this is a tough call between the two, FriendFeed and Posterous. Freindfeed allows quick posting via web and email and allows file attachment. Posterous takes away the boundaries typically associated with blogging while keeping the whole process familiar. It’s dead easy and would be the preferred way to learn how all this social media works together. For this reason, I’d pick Posterous with a strong suggestion to also check out Friendfeed, in order to discover how a stream of information is displayed and used online.

How these Apps Will Advance CAD/PLM
Currently, CAD and PLM is a static, somewhat disconnected way of designing and tracking information. It mirrors, to an extent, what typical blogs are today. Content is created, published (released) and consumed (built). The comments come in and splashes of collaboration happen here and there. In an environment similar to what Freindfeed and Posterous are CAD and PLM apps would be feed information from devices and applications able to connect and feed information to the model and designer/engineer/manufacturing. The programs could then immediately feed production systems real-time model data and information based on conditional notifications.

That’s all great for copying what web technology is doing, but CAD/PLM apps can advance beyond this by very simply integrating adaptive processes and more semantic features/search. We all want a better way to find the junk out there about what programs we use, the models we create in them and the discussions going on around them. Not only within the applications themselves, but also within web technologies where collaboration and issue resolutions are happening. I mention this, because there’s people out there thinking about this – people thinking about how we create/use 3D data, how we can automatically generate 3D geometry based on purpose and environment while manufacturing is automatically aware of what is coming and adapts accordingly. Most likely we’ll see a more relevant future web, and I’d like to think we’ll see more relevant future CAD/PLM systems.

Allright, dang, that was deep and all serious and way to long. This wasn’t meant to be an article, but you got me going, so enjoy the added commentary and thought about where we’re all going with CAD/PLM and this crazy web world we’re living in.

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Tagged as: articles, content distrubution, friendfeed, posterous, tumblr, Web Technology, wordpress

  • olegshilovitsky
    Josh, I think to talk how PLM can leverage blog and other social platforms is great. I think there is significant gap between what customers see today as product lifecycle management and how they see blogging (and other enterprise 2.0) software. I think technology we have today is not ready to bridge this gap.

    some more things about possible ways for PLM online/on cloud:
    http://plmtwine.com/2009/06/16/cloudy-plm-roadm...

    Regards, Oleg
  • Hi Oleg, thanks. I really hope we do more than leverage or add aspects of these apps into CAD/PLM software. They're wonderful examples of simplifying content distribution. A good example of simplifying a process that can be complicated like PLM integration/use.

    But I really hope we can look past what's being done on the web and get some innovation going, not that there isn't any, but I'd really like to see more power in 3D geometry creation and the link that can be automated between manufacturing and other resources. I think the tech is there, it's just the mind-sets we have to overcome, on the user end and developer end. Thanks for the link too! see ya.
  • I think I'm finally starting to see what you're trying to say regarding the relationship between the two. We already have tools like phone/email/chat/IM/webcasts/netmeeting/PLM/PDM.... that we use for communicating on a daily basis about our work and projects... Why not leverage the same tools we use to communicate in our "personal" realms like the blogging/socialmedia/etc. to communicate in business. I think it's a great discussion for sure.
  • Josh - Nice Post, raced out & set up Posterous straight away. Is it away to share information, It appears to be without setting up a full blog. Thanks
  • Glad you like it Michael. I think it's a great example of how content distribution can be simplified and expanded. Let me know how it goes!
  • Hello Josh-

    Yes, the cloud is coming, but when? How will companies that conform to ISO 9001:2000 and FDA regulations move up to the cloud? I'm preparing documentation for this and it looks arduous at this point in time. However, change is inevitable.

    Great post, thanks. Now I'll crank up my iTunes and listen to Cloud 9, the Temptations, and Get Off My Cloud, the Rolling Stones.

    Devon
  • Hey Devon, thanks. Well, 'the cloud' as we like to call it is pretty much here. Most companies use a server to store data. Some are local, some are not so local. Once Rackspace is able to better deal with these outside a dedicated service solution, there'll be more companies that have to comply with those standards looking at offiste data storage, that is less cost and less maintenance.

    But for those that don't need that level of compliance, there's very cheap solutions right now.
  • Good points, Josh.

    ISO/FDA regulations include security and validation issues that need to be addressed for a non-self hosted Cloud server. These are just some of the specific issues that I'm documenting now. More to come.

    Devon
  • It's my job to watch this stuff. And by and large, i spend a lot of time doing just that--watching. The problem I see universally is fragmentation. Silos. Whatever you want to call them. Everything exists separately, and while technology companies are developing API applications to pull things from there to here, it's still fragmented. It's hard to have a conversation across platforms.

    To some extent, FriendFeed tries to do this by pulling in things that you're doing all over the social web. But still, you're not getting a narrative. You're getting a series of disjointed things that are happening in various walled communities. So what if I posted a YouTube video of the Dinosaur Jr. show I saw last night and then replied to you on Twitter about buying a minivan? Where's the correlation? All that's happening is that we're increasing the amount of noise we generate, and for the most part, our lives aren't that dynamic.

    What we're missing, and what we're badly in need of (and what I think we're moving toward), is a master platform. Something that lets you do everything you do in Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Wordpress, etc. in one place. I think that's what Facebook is moving toward, slowly but surely. Will they get there? I don't know--they have maybe another 2-3 years before the next big thing comes along. But someone will. A few years ago I thought that Google's OpenSocial initiative would get us there, but these days I'm not so sure. The new Wave thing they're pushing now looks interesting, but again, it's just trying to one-up FriendFeed essentially. Yes, you can see conversations threaded across platforms, but they're still taking place on separate platforms.

    With regard to the CAD/PLM space, we need to stop thinking about technology and platform and think about needs and purpose. What do design teams need? I could be wrong here, but the way I see it, design teams need the ability to communicate easily with all of the other groups that touch them, from R&D to sales to marketing to vendors and suppliers. The trick is to develop a system that allows these disparate groups to communicate with one another in ways that are natural to each, yet easily understood by all. How do we provide marketing with the tools to communicate with design in a mutually-understood language? How do we give the designer the tools to communicate design intent with suppliers using different CAD platforms? Do we somehow convince the various CAD vendors to supply open APIs so things become interoperable? How does that work?

    I think you had it right at first when you said "crapalicious." There's a lot of crap out there. On the social web, the signal to noise ratio is extremely weighted on the noise side, and one of the things we need to ask ourselves is if it's even worth it to aggregate all of these conversations. Crap + more crap =/= quality. Maybe what we need are filtering tools, not aggregation tools...
  • Josh - great post.

    Where does Google 3D Warehouse fit in? Since it's limited to SKP and COLLADA content, I can see how its value for PLM is extremely limited. But it does offer a worthy example, I think, given the features for sharing, publishing and collaborating on 3D content.

    Peter
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