Now, a workplace-centered social network doesn’t sound too exciting, unless you really like your coworkers. Fortunately, I do. Kinda. Enough to make Convofy a useful and entertaining tool for me. The Noisecast has a Facebook group that we use, but it’s mainly for yelling ideas at each other, and mocking Steven. We also use Twitter for quick contact with each other, but again, that’s mainly for mockery. Of course, there’s email, but that almost seems too formal for young tech-savvy studs like us.

Convofy takes the place of a meeting room. You can drop pictures into it to share with your followers or groups, and members can mark them up and add comments. Or draw balls on them.  But seriously, this, coupled with Skype (or our preferred voice communication method: Teamspeak) allows the Noisecast crew to pretend they’re not spread across the entire country.

The Rundown:

When you log in for the first time, you’re automatically granted permission to a group based on your email address. This is how Convofy keeps this social network within your business only. Once in the network,  you can post comments, reply to others’ comments, upload picture and music files and even created separate groups within the larger network for more focus contact. If you click on someone’s profile, you’re given their title, links to other social media sites that they’ve listed, as well as the option to IM them if they’re online.

Why is all of this useful? As I’ve said before, we’re spread out. We don’t have meetings, we have emails that sent out and get ignored. The Facebook Group doesn’t support business style file sharing, and Google Docs doesn’t allow for very good discussion. Convofy changes that. We can point out things we don’t like, discuss article topics and share ideas all in one place. While certain things deserve to be discussed via email, but for quick hive-mind questions, Convofy fills the gap. My fellow Editors have their own opinions:

Agrippa’s Analysis

I love it. I haven’t been this impressed by some new toy I randomly stumbled across in a long time. Perhaps it’s the shade of Wave about it. I was an active user of Wave and was genuinely upset when it failed. It frees us from infinite email threads, allows real time collaborations that are *in context*, is lightweight and solves the desktop notification problem by being on the desktop. To be fair, a lot of these features (minus desktop) already exist on Facebook, Tinychat, Skype, etc. We’ve already been using those other services for collaboration. It makes Convofy almost redundant. But Convofy gives us a walled sandbox to play in and is intuitive. Within an hour, 3 of the 4 main editors were actively using it with no learning curve. All my positivity aside, I do have a sense of “creep” descending on me from all the ways I’m in contact with the team. This is hardly Convofy’s fault. My verdict is positive.

Source : Convofy