RippleRap

Whilst at LeWeb3 in Paris earlier in December I had the opportunity to test drive RippleRap.com from my buddies over at Osmosoft. Ripple Rap is a note sharing tool that can be used in Conferences, telephone meetings and the like. One missing feature was a mechanism to give feedback, so I thought I'd throw something up on here and send it over to them.

RippleRap is built on TiddlyWiki, a open source, primarily client based all-in-one wiki page and so I was somewhat familiar with the navigation and use of the application.

So, the question that I wanted answered was why I would want something like this instead of a text editor (local or hosted) or a wiki page online? The wifi at LeWeb was up and down and as you run RippleRap from disc you would never get any connection errors. If you were using a hosted solution you would have had to use local based notes and copy and paste all over the place. If that were the case, why not use just a local text editor? Well, when you do have connection, RippleRap automatically publishes any saved notes to anyone else using the app for that conference. This means others can read your notes and conversely, you can read other people's notes.

I got some benefit being able to read other people's notes from the conference. Others had picked up on things I missed and I could read notes from sessions I missed as soon as someone saved their notes (and had connection to publish). Some added quotes, some commentary and thoughts; I think a range of different possibilities will emerge if this grows.

I like the fact I can also get the feeds from agenda points, there's a great example from JPs talk.

There were some things that could be improved upon and new features which could spring up. My thoughts drift the idea of a conference dashboard where I could enter tags which I'm interested in and be presented in feeds from the web tagged with that information. For example, the tag LeWeb3 appeared in Twitter, Flickr and probably a whole bunch more. I'd also like to be able to tune that to get updates from sites which I'm interested in and not to receive updates from sites in which I'm not interested in.

I'd also like to have a permalink to the notes I've and others have made so I can quote those in blog posts.

It'd be cool to be able to go to RippleRap.com to set up a conference with agenda and then pull that down to distribute it, or get the permalink to that for others to download.