A Travel Guide to Collaboration.

"It takes a shared space to create shared understanding," he says. "If there’s no shared space, there’s no collaboration. Period."

Technologies that create shared space and tools for collaboration fall into two categories: real-time and asynchronous/persistent

Stowe Boyd comments on the article and has this to say:

I have…shifted to the perspective that slow-time is just a degenerate and inadequate approximation of real-time

I…suggest that real-time should be the primary basis of every sort of human collaboration, and that slow-time introduces (in general) unnecessary complexities

I’ve been using Groove for several years now.  I primarily use the file-sharing and messaging features.  More recently I’ve been trying out InterComm by Five Across.  It’s a simple collaboration app with some unique features.  They recently added an RSS reader.

The practicality of real-time collaboration makes it less common as perhaps asynchronous collaboration, but I believe it should be what collaboration software should strive for.