Weekly meetings are the SUXORS

February 29, 2008 11:45 AM

A private Twitter for groups? I'm trying to come up with a novel solution for my office... We don't want to have weekly meetings to keep track of what each other is doing. Here's the situation...

We all work as consultants on a large project, although in different areas of expertise (though all aviation related).

Weekly meetings aren't cutting it - so I suggested that we do some sort of weblog or twitter-y kind of thing. Something that we can all post to on the fly...

It has to be easy to use. Not everyone here is computer savvy.
Everyone needs a unique userid so we can understand who's talking.
It has to be password protected and not viewable by the public.

Moral of the story is that we want a way to keep everyone updated in the group as to what we're all doing, WITHOUT having to have the dreaded weekly meeting.

Any ideas?? I figure there has to be SOME sort of software out there already. I thought twitter would be a good idea, but I'm not familiar with it and don't know if it can do the 'private group' thing.

posted by matty to computers & internet (16 comments total)

It seems that email would work really well for this. Come up with a distinctive subject line, set up a filter on everyone's mail so the updates go into a single folder. Need to check your updates? Look in the folder.
posted by infinitewindow at 11:50 AM on February 29

Basecamp! or Campfire.
posted by GuyZero at 11:52 AM on February 29

Have you considered a (private) weblog? Twitter may be a little too precious for your needs.
posted by arco at 11:52 AM on February 29

Also, if you use Exchange with Outlook you can create private shared email folders.
posted by GuyZero at 11:53 AM on February 29

You could use something like wordpress I guess... It seems like something like basecamp might also be a good idea.
posted by majikstreet at 11:53 AM on February 29

There is a WordPress theme called Prologue that emulates the Twitter style.
posted by indyz at 12:11 PM on February 29

Basecamp.
posted by unixrat at 12:12 PM on February 29

Google Sites
posted by birdherder at 12:16 PM on February 29

Set up a group at Google Groups. Private, extensible, yadda yadda yadda
posted by blue_beetle at 12:27 PM on February 29

Pownce does the same 'post a quick message' thing that Twitter does, except that you can easily restrict it to a group of your contacts.
posted by chrismear at 12:29 PM on February 29

I'm assuming live discussion is important.

Twitter does let you have a private account. This means your postings are not visible to the public. Twitter has no groups per se. So you could make it work, although you might want a separate work account on Twitter, and it's not really set up for this kind of thing.

Also remember that each message has a max 140 character length, which might be a dealbreaker.

You can also do group chats using the jabber chat protocol (which is what Google uses), and if you use Google Talk, the chat transcript will appear in your gmail account..

But yeah, Campfire is really designed for exactly this kind of thing.
posted by adamrice at 12:39 PM on February 29

Why are the weekly meetings dreaded? Maybe try changing your perception and switch to daily meetings.
posted by Lleyam at 1:09 PM on February 29

Campfire looks PERFECT.

Thanks hive mind!!!
posted by matty at 1:09 PM on February 29

hiveminder.com is pretty cool
posted by bkeene12 at 4:16 PM on February 29

At my work we have a few conference or group chats or whatever they're called on the company Jabber server. Works pretty well.

You could set up an IRC server for the company.

A while back I knew someone whose department all idled in a company MUD — different rooms for different states, activities, and so on.
posted by hattifattener at 6:14 PM on February 29

I'm sure campfire will work for you, but I want to throw in another vote for gmail / gchat. You can have live chats with individuals or groups, and the chat transcripts are saved with your email. Taggable, searchable, same as email. You can even respond to an email with a chat, or vice versa. I think it's pretty sweet.
posted by Chris4d at 1:11 PM on March 3