I was turned onto Ubergroups yesterday (having completley missed other commentary on the product).

In a nutshell, it is a social tools space for team-based project work, supporting real-time (IM, Chat, file transfer) and slow-time (blogs, file repository, Chat history, etc) communication and coordination.

The underlying instant messaging protocol is Jabber, and I was able to communicate with a partner through their java-based client, as well as Gush. It looks like any Jabber compliant IM client will work.

However, despite the company's positioning as an IM product first, and social media solution, second, I think their emphasis is wrong.

This is a direct competitor to products like Basecamp and Groove, which are intended (through completely different architectures) to support team-based project collaboration. As I said today in a phone conversation with James Payne of Rhombus, they should pay me a royalty on the product since it lines up so well with the wishlist of features I suggested to Jason Fried, one of the architects of Basecamp.

Web-based Collaboration with IM Client

The basic schema is based on a list of groups. Within each group there are users, blogs, persistent chatrooms, and (James suggests) in the future other elements for coordination, like calendars, to dos, etc. They support RSS feeds from each group, although they are encrypted and require login, and not many RSS readers support that (though apparently Gush does).

Each team (strangely enough, they are not called groups) opens with a 'home' dashboard view that includes a "team narrative" -- which is the concatenation of the blog entries from all the groups blogs.

This is an interesting model. Within a group you can have single author blogs, or blogs that all can contribute to. The entries can be commented on, but I have found no notion of trackback in today's implementation, nor permalinks (at least that I found in my first look).

A team space also can have any number of persistent chat rooms (which are not integrated into the team narrative, strangely).

I found the Java client straight forward to use, and the chat room experience just like you'd expect. The most recent activity in the chat rooms is accessible through the web interface, but you need to be running the Java client to enter the chat rooms: they haven't moved to a standard Jabber (XMPP) protocol for that, yet.

Bottom Line

With the exception of some minor annoyances (like not working under Firefox on Mac OS X, at the moment), Ubergroups is almost the answer to my prayers. I am working in dozens of projects with all sorts of different groups. I am constantly IMing, alerting group members of status updates, being pinged through RSS of new critical info, etc. -- just like you.

If coupled with Gush-style client -- both IM and RSS -- I can see Ubergroups being the killer app in this social media project space. I have written in the past about how I would like Gush to reorder their notion of IM roster and RSS feeds so that they are integrated around project groups, with both feeds and user presence collated into group tabs. For the moment, Hopefully Gush will be revamped to fill this missing piece of the puzzle, or some smart RSS reader company might implement all the client side niceties.

Now I just have to see how much of a pain it will be to transfer our existing projects from Basecamp over to Ubergroups.