Outage

Our servers skrbl & teamskrbl were down from around 11.30 PM last night to about 8.10 AM this morning. My apologies to users.

The outage was at my ISP CI-Host (www.cihost.com) and apparently caused by a broken access cable that brought down their data center. I thought hosting providers were supposed to plan for these kind of contingencies by having multiple access points, aren't they? 8 hour outages are ridiculous, & I will investigate more and also look for alternative co-lo providers (suggestions welcome).

Once again dear users, please pardon us for the inconvenience.

skrbl on.

Thank you kindly

Dear User,

Its been a year since we first met. Ajaxian broke the ice last December, others helped too later like Stephen Downes, Lifehacker, Websare and many many more. Most of all you, dear user, have worked to make this a strong relationship and for this our thanks.

Its been a hectic and exhilarating time, you have been demanding (of performance) and understanding (of our bugs). For our part we've tried to listen, and build and test and deploy (though not necessarily in that order :). To recap, essentialy we kept building it and you came, 221,000 skrblers, from 174 countries, creating 72,000 whiteboards - thanks much.

Its been educational, we've learnt a great deal - what you like (one click start without registering - very popular), and what you don't (complicated features - duh!). Now at the end of a year there are, of course, things that I wish had gone differently, but all in all 20/20 hindsight & your ongoing feedback gives us good clarity for the future and things to get done next.

Work has been slower recently as we struggle to overcome some mundate distractions (money, survival ... silly little things like that) but worry not, things will work out, they always do in this fairy tale (with a little bit of help from friends) and we shall continue to skrbl together happily evermore.

Once again dear user, thanks for coming, thanks for adopting skrbl & helping us grow, thank you for your continued encouragement and inspiration, you make me want to be a better product!

Sincerely
skrbl

- plug - Try out skrbl for teams. Features listed here

To scribble and perchance to learn?

This week, November 12 - 17th is "International Education Week". Organized "... to recognize the global exchange environment between the United States and other countries".

The official site lists a lot of global events, but here is something else I came across. David in New Zealand is planning on using skype and skrbl to teach a couple of graphics classes to students in the UK. What better way to establish a relationship between two schools and students in two different countries.

NZ to the UK is very nearly as distant as you can get while still staying on planet, more power to you David. I hope things go smoothly (Please send me your feedback). Here's hoping you and the students all have an exciting story to tell, I look forward to seeing your video.

Go Team!

Thank you all who have been giving us feedback on the - team edition. We really appreciate your involvement and help in improving skrbl.
New users we need your feedback too, pls. feel free to mail your comments, suggestions & critiques to rashidATruvekaDOTcom. Please be gentle ;)
And for those who haven't tried out the team edition yet, check out the features on this comparision chart.

Have you checked out the changes in the video? Instead of a person to person call it is now to all users on the whiteboard. Of course you still have to be a registered team user to initiate a video conference but all whiteboard participants are invited to the video conference by default. The logic being - the team is on the whiteboard to work together, so a video conference with the whole team is more natural than one on one calls.

Of course if you want to communicate one on one with a team member there is skrbl's one click skype call or text chat.

More changes are in the works, a simple new widget for your whiteboard, changes in how tasks are handled. We will continue to try making skrbl "harder, better, faster, stronger"...

Happily ever after?

This is what I came across on our home page today (on the graffiti board).



Skrbling a marriage proposal!!!
Talk about user participation, this is a first for us, a use case we never dreamt up(guess I need to update the user documentation :). The online equivalent of shouting it out from the rooftops, a new paradigm for the new Millenium (I do 2.0 ?).

Good luck kids, hope it all works out for you, and if you feel like sharing, do write in and tell us how it played out... always love a happy ending.

skrbl in class 2

"The best compliment anyone can give your product is to actually use it" - ???
I dont know if someone ever said that, but if not, someone should.

Last week it was a classfull of students discussing Steinbeck on skrbl. This week it is a classfull of students discussing Arthur Miller, read about it on the blog and see it on VIDEO...

skrbl in the classroom

Users keep coming up with cool new uses of skrbl and (perhaps not surprisingly) teachers are particularly innovative in using skrbl in the classroom. Here is a good example. 19 students discussing Steinbeck, no less, collaborating on the skrbl whiteboard, writing, commenting, reacting... tres cool.
Here is end result.


Much thanks Mr. Lewisberry for using skrbl and writing about it, it's users like you that keep our wheels rolling.