Advocate's Studio

Yesterday’s news feeds brought me two new applications that can ably serve as assistants in your process of getting things done. The first is FellowUp, a tool that helps you make the most of your various social web connections. The second is Flow, a beautiful group task management app that puts your to do list front and center in a very dynamic way.

First, FellowUp. This CRM tool tackles a problem made almost monumental in the digital, social sharing age: how do you maintain relationships across social networks, relationships that might actually yield positive experiences and networking fruit? You connect your social networks to the application, which then mines your networks for “insights”, such as important events, happenings, job changes, etc. From FellowUp’s dashboard, you can then comment or connect over the “insight”, making a positive impression on your friend or colleague and, in essence, “following up” with them. Get quick note of important life events and even common interests, which you can then act on if you wish. Of course, like any good CRM, FellowUp affords a useful mechanism for saving and storing contact information across networks in one place for easy access. Mobile access too, with a companion iPhone application. FellowUp has a more personal feel than competitors such as Salesforce, Xobni or LinkedIn, and a more effective interface for acting on events. Another cool feature: use it as a personal “to do” application by creating a new contact for yourself and adding notes, reminders, tasks or anything else you need to bring to your frontal lobe. FollowUp currently connects with Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and Outlook. The site indicates that the team is working to add iCal, Yahoo, Twitter, hotmail-live, Salesforce, MySpace and more. A plug-in for Gmail and Outlook is in the works. FellowUp is in private beta right now, but even at this early stage, it promises to be an interesting way to deal with burgeoning online communities of friends, colleagues and acquaintances,  helping us make more meaningful connections in a rapidly disconnecting world.

Next in line, Flow. Flow is all about managing and delegating tasks to your team. In their sample vid, the “team” is a group of kids (I know, aging myself here) setting about to have a party. But your aspirations with this gorgeous app can certainly rise higher. The problem Flow is attempting to solve is similar to FollowMe – how to pull together disparate tasks and to-dos scattered across various applications and platforms and localize them in one place for easy management. Use Flow from your browser or a companion Mac desktop application. Use if for personal and work related tasks, by entering a name, a due date, contacts you’d like to include in the task-completion process, and relevant tags. You can group tasks into projects. Collaborators can add content to tasks, including real-time comments, which is a huge boon on a short deadline. You can add tasks and can delegate by email and all team members get access to a single dashboard. And, of course, there is the ubiquitous companion iPhone application.

To say the interface is pretty would be an understatement. But, at $9.99 per month, it should be. Still, let it be known that $99 per year for a virtual assistant is not a bad deal, particularly if it helps you get your work done and done effectively and efficiently.

Check out these very cool new apps. And be watching for more – clearly developers are plagued with the same professional problems as us little folk and keep coming up with creative ways to solve them.

Doug Cornelius (Compliance Building) and I had a most excellent time presenting our lunch seminar on Beyond LinkedIn: Advanced Social Media for Lawyers yesterday at the Boston Bar Association. If you were unable to attend, you can still check out our presentation materials. Here are our presentation slides:

You also can view our handout collecting web tools and resources (link here).

Related articles by Zemanta

• Social and Collaborative Marketing Trends (debaird.net)
• My ACLEA Orlando Social Media Presentation (kevin.lexblog.com)
• Social Networking is Serious Business – AIIM Presentation (slideshare.net)

What attorney hasn’t longed for a simple means of comparing, merging and incorporating changes into documents? It’s what we do!

For the hefty price of FREE, CompareMyDocs offers a web-based service that compares and marks up to seven documents. Differences are displayed in a neat interface. Changes are color-coded and you can hover over text to accept or reject a particular change. After you are done with CompareMyDocs, simply download the final to your own word processor for the finishing touches.

CompareMyDocs works for Rich Text Format and Word formatted documents. The site cautions that it works best for text only documents, as tables and other graphics are not displayed.  It is currently in Beta.

CompareMyDocs is a close cousin of the desktop application TextFlow. TextFlow is not yet widely available and remains closed while tweaking is done. CompareMyDocs, however, is available – it launched today.

Now before you go pegging me with assertions that a web-based document comparison app is no place for client-sensitive information, consider how difficult it is to even edit or compare versions of your firm’s newsletter! I still get agita using the comparable functions in Word 2007. Consider it for what it is worth: a handy free app that offers a simpler view of the life and times of your documents.

Hat Tip to ReadWriteWeb

Moving right along here, people, at warp speed, Google Wave is destined to get its own app store. Zee at The Next Web reports on the scuttlebut from the recent Google Technology User Group conference in London. App stores are all the rage these days, with Apple’s iPhone / iPod Touch store leading the charge. Now we are seeing similar venues for web-based applications, such as oneforty for Twitter. Sounds exciting? Consider a Wave marketplace that stocks applications for use within Wave as well as applications that run on the desktop, in the browser or across hardware platforms. Developers encouraged to use Wave’s API with the promise of a return via an app store are more likely to devote their best efforts towards creatively employing tech to Wave’s ends.

 Applications and tools are beginning to look more and more like Erector sets of old: if you are bored with the same old, just buy the add-on to re-ignite and personlize your experience to your specific need.

Now you know the modern web movement has achieved stranglehold status when the venerable U.S. Post Office goes on-line and mobile. Many of the same services available on the usps.com website are now accessible via mobile devices. Features include track and confirm, post office locator and zip code lookup. Right now, the features come in the form of a mobile web version but keep on the lookout for more specific applications for smartphones that take advantage of the phone’s GPS functionality.

Hat tip to Resource Shelf.