Mark Morgan pointed out, in reply to my original Groovin’ message, that the current Groove.Net client is Wintel only, although from what I’ve read clients for other systems are definitely planned.
After installing the program on my system and playing with it, I am impressed but I wonder if the software isn’t a bit ahead of its time.
Before my current job, I worked with a videoconferencing group at Pharmacia & Upjohn. Sharing data in a collaborative environment as easily as we could share video was a very high priority and I saw numerous products that promised this — Groove.Net really blows them all away. If there’s a collaborative process you might want, it’s in there, and it looks gorgeous. It features a very nice user interface.
Somehow in my first goaround I missed the part in Jon Udell’s interview with Ray Ozzie where Ozzie said,
First, it’s possible to send e-mail directly into a shared space (through a Relay Server) — provided an appropriate method of addressing the e-mail, and a cooperating tool within the shared space. Thus, e-mail users will be able to, in essence, send or “cc” e-mail directly to a group of users sharing a Groove shared space.
So users can send e-mail to a “shared space” much as I can e-mail this web site.
Will Groove succeed? I dunno. Even though it looked good I couldn’t help but feeling a lot of the articles were basically Napster-bandwagon hype. From reading comments by users and my own experiments, it seems to have some pretty serious latency problems over the Internet, though works very nice on a LAN making it an interesting option for the corporate environment (as some folks on Slashdot pointed out, all Groove really is, boiled down to its core, is a peer-to-peer version of Hotline.