Yesterday, I was reading a thread on evolt.org’s thelist, perhaps the oldest community of web designers and programmers around.

The topic of the thread was OpenID, the implementation of which on websites is one of the most contentious issues I’ve seen in a long time. Some of the input from the thread:

I have discovered OpenID,
Here is a link if you haven’t heard of it, http://openid.net/
I am un-sure at the moment whether this is a good secure service and I was wondering if any of you folks had any experience with this.

Last I checked, it was going to be too much of a headache for us to implement

I’ve only seen it used on stackoverflow.com, which is even a headache
for a user if you don’t habitually authenticate with one of their
OpenID providers whenever you surf.

I gazed over the specs and that’s exactly what happens.

Personally, I wouldn’t even bother with it. I think it’s a case of “good
ideal, bad implementation”.

Given that Backboard allows you to authenticate with OpenID:

and that embedit.in requires you to do so (the buttons for AOL, Yahoo!, and Google are merely shortcuts to the OpenID URLs for those providers):

you might suspect we have something to say about the whole matter. And you’d be right. The way we see it, OpenID fundamentally solves two very important problems while creating one new problem.

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Last week brought some big changes to Backboard.  A few things that we wanted to push didn’t quite make it into that release, so yesterday, we updated Backboard yet again with some nifty new features.  Upload a new Backboard and check them out!

Text highlighting

Ever find yourself wanting to highlight the text in a Backboard instead of underline or circle it?  Well now you can.  Simply mouse over the text in question and highlight away.  You’ll still get the familiar text entry box to make your suggestions, but now the selected area behind the text will remain highlighted.

The need for speed

If you have a lot of Backboards on your My Backboards page like we do, then you probably noticed that the page took some time to load.  Well wait no longer, we’ve significantly improved the loading speed of the My Backboards page.  Images are only loaded when you need them and no earlier, meaning the page loads and responds much quicker.  We also made some tweaks to the javascript loading on other parts of the site to improve response times and will continue to look for places we can improve the speed of the site.

As always…

We love bringing you new features and we hope you’re as excited about these changes as we are.  As always, let us know what you think!

I gave a short three-minute presentation to the Silicon Valley JavaScript Meetup Group last month about Backboard. I talked a little bit about Backboard and how it does real-time feedback using Orbited. Enjoy!

For the second time in as many days, Backboard has major new features! We’ve been really busy doing lots of great stuff, and the whole team is excited to share them with you today.

A new look

The first change is the most obvious: Backboard has a fresh new look:

Time zones

The Backboard team lives and works in California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and having Pacific Standard Time on the server works great for us. But we realize that some of you live in other time zones, so we’ve added support for multiple time zones.

If you don’t change anything, Backboard will make its best guess as to what the correct time zone for you is, but you can always set it by visiting your account settings:

Deadlines

Want all of your feedback by a certain time? Backboard can’t force your colleagues to be any less lazy, but it can tell them by when you want their feedback.

Backboard will email your colleagues when the deadline is approaching and tell them if they’ve missed it. Castigating them for being deadbeats, though, is still up to you.

Built-in printing, with markup!

One feature requested more than any others is printing your documents with feedback. Even though we love extolling the virtues of a paperless office, there still are times when you’d love to have a hard copy. Wait no longer: right below your document, you’ll find a print button that will give you the option to print the document, the feedback, or both:

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Since Backboard first launched red pen annotation, I’ve been amazed by all the creative ways to leave feedback.  Each member of the Backboard team expresses themselves differently: circles, underlines, big cross-outs, arrows; you name it, we’ve seen it.

Like Carlos, a new Backboard user that posted on our feedback Backboard last week, sometimes you need a little more structure to your drawing.  If you’re not into free form annotation, you can hold down Shift while you’re drawing to create a straight line or the Option (Mac)/Alt (Windows) key for an oval.  The perfectionists out there can use both for a perfect circle.

Lately, the Backboard team has taken annotation to the next level (whether it’s a level up for its creativity or a level down for its ridiculousness is up to you to decide).  After feedback is closed on team Backboards, small red-pen animals, vehicles and other doodles often show up.  Here’s a sample for your enjoyment:

And my personal favorite, TROGDOR the BURNiNATOR burninating the countryside.  On the original Backboard, this is an animation.  Mouse over the first part of the feedback and see TROGDOR brighten.  Mouse over the second part, and see his burninating.

We’d like to share the fun with the Backboard community.  Link me to the Backboard featuring your best feedback art (in the comments) by Wednesday, February 11.  I’ll set the best annotation artist up with a complimentary month of a premium Backboard account.

Spam is a constant problem — I would guess this not news to you — and there are countless software packages and tools available to fight it with varying success rates.

One common technique is to use a temporary or disposable email address when signing up for online services so that it doesn’t matter if the company turns around and spams you or, worse yet, sells your address. You could use your old Hotmail address for this purpose or even a custom service like Mailinator.

Often, you have a better technique right at your fingertips that requires no extra effort on your part: plus-addressing.

Let’s say your email address is:

john.doe@gmail.com

You will also receive email sent to:

john.doe+anything@gmail.com

That is, you can add a plus sign and then any word to your email address, and it will still be delivered to you!

Next time you sign up for an online service, use a +servicename sub-address. If you start receiving spam at that address, not only can you hold the service accountable but you can easily set up a rule in your email program to delete it all.

Email providers vary in their support of sub-addressing and some (such as Yahoo) use minus-addressing instead (where the plus sign is replaced by a minus sign), but with a few quick test emails you should be able to figure out what works for you.

With Backboard, we promise to never disclose your email address to anyone and we have gone to great lengths to make sure you get the smallest amount of email required to make the service work.

If you want to test us though, sign up for Backboard with a +backboard sub-address and see for yourself!

Over at The Apple Blog, I was debating what it means to collaborate on a document with some other The Apple Blog fans. In reference to Apple’s iWork.com, a reader remarked:

…the “collaboration” falls a bit short. True collaboration is online editing, something this service lacks.

It’s a common misconception that collaborating on a document can only mean group editing. In fact, as you consider the situations you or I encounter on a daily basis, very few call for group editing of a document:

• Asking your boss to do a quick once-over of an important client proposal — you want high level feedback, not a re-write of paragraph 3.
• Getting feedback from your peers on the design and contents of a product brief — the last thing you want is three people to move the screenshot to three different locations on the page.
• Obtaining the ‘ok’ from engineering that all the technical details in a report are correct — do you really want the engineering manager rewriting your carefully crafted prose?
• Getting feedback from a client on a contract, proposal or other project — like another commenter on The Apple Blog entry mentioned, you don’t want clients editing your work. It’s not easy to explain why you didn’t make their changes. After all they are hiring you because you can do a better job.

Even if the work case is a group of people equally responsible for producing a document, documents produced through “editing by the masses” are often inconsistent in style, tone, or even facts. There is a strong possibility some edits even introduce backward progress, undoing decisions made earlier. Even after the group finishes, a publishable document likely requires a large amount of post-production individual editing. There is huge value and time save in a gatekeeper, passing around each draft for comments or feedback and then making only the changes he or she deems relevant.

Group editing also demands significant time from those providing feedback. If you’ve ever been asked to provide feedback on a child’s report for school, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It doesn’t take much time to suggest a change in paragraph order or point out awkward sentences. The time consuming part is suggesting an example of how a sentence could be more clear or rewriting the introductory paragraph. In short, feedback is quicker than rewriting.

Effective, efficient collaboration is all about speeding up the iterative cycle, making it easy to get input and guidance throughout the development process. Group editing opens up the document to the inefficiencies of consensus, but feedback, using a tool like Backboard, provides the benefits of early-and-often input without the dangers of committee editing.

Yesterday as a group we sat down over lunch to watch a pair of user testing videos.   These were two people who had never used Backboard before and were being asked to give feedback on a document produced by a “colleague” of theirs. The prompt follows:

Goal: You received an email from a colleague of yours asking you to review a document and leave your feedback. The email contains the following link: (some random link to a testing Backboard)

Both users were able to visit the site and (somewhat) successfully use the product to provide feedback. It is not in the successes that user testing is useful, but in the failures.  

When someone fails to perform a task that seems trivial you are forced to rethink the problem. They approached the task as an outsider and you must be able to put yourself in their shoes. We learned a lot from these tests and will continue to use them as a tool to understand how people view Backboard.  We have even incorporated user testing into our weekly routine.  They inspire us to continually view the product through a user’s eyes.

On Tuesday, we mentioned the striking resemblance between Backboard and Apple’s new iWork.com. Soliciting opinions, we sent it out to a bunch of members of the Mac community for their input and feedback. The responses were interesting and varied, but this particular one, from The Apple Blog editor Josh Pigford, especially caught my eye:

Thanks for the link. Sure iWork.com “feels” like Backboard… but Backboard doesn’t integrate with iWork docs… which is precisely what iWork.com is for. It’s not for every document-using person on earth.

In your post you said:

“You don’t have to switch to Pages, Numbers, and Keynote in order to use Backboard to get feedback on your documents. Use Word, or InDesign, or OpenOffice.org! It all just works.”

That’s precisely why I want iWork.com…because I use Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.

Once Backboard has iWork integration, let’s talk.

Never to be one to back down from a challenge, we spent a couple hours with Mike Solomon’s excellent SIMBL and came up with something. Guess what, Josh! Backboard now has iWork integration.

How it works

Just install this software package and relaunch your iWork apps. In the toolbar, you’ll now have a new button right next to the iWork.com button:

Simply click it and you’re on your way. It’s also available from the Share menu, in case you want to assign a keyboard shortcut:

Try it out!

Download Backboard Plug-in for iWork ‘09 (163 KB, requires iWork ‘09 to be installed)

Always listening to feedback

Remember, Backboard is constantly changing and evolving in response to your requests; without the people who use it, Backboard wouldn’t be where it is today. In this case, we had a chance to implement something in response to one person’s feedback, and we’re always looking for more ideas.

Let us know what you think, and Happy Backboarding!

Every once in a while I’ll be writing and think of two or three ways I could approach a paragraph.  Or Jeff is designing an image and ends up with several possible options.  Multiple iterations are a positive thing, but deciding which to run can be a difficult prospect.

I could conduct an old-fashioned poll, asking for votes by email or survey and select the winner.  I’d run the risk, however, of the best option being none of my proposed choices.

Backboard is a convenient way to gather opinions from your audience while learning more about what motivated each vote and getting further feedback on the concepts at play.  A straightforward poll will never produce: “combine the squiggle from this logo with the text from the other” or “I love the first paragraph of this draft and the last half of the other one”.  Backboard will, and your work will be better for opening discussion up to more than just A, B, or C.

Just press cancel the first time Backboard prompts you to share, upload each option as a different version on your Backboard, and give them unique names.  Then press the “invite reviewers” button when you’re ready to share with your audience.

Here’s an example.