I love the idea of collaboration. I love drawing. Collaborative drawing is a rare thing… it hardly ever works…. for me at least… and one of the main reasons is because of the lack of ownership within the collaboration. Collaboration shouldn’t be about letting some random idiot ruin your stuff (or the other way around).
Doodle-board is ok but you very quickly want your own board. Having anything collaborative where there is more of a motive for vandalism will always fail.
I wonder why the drawing tools themselves are so laggy. Drawing isn’t drawing when there’s a lag, it’s a bit like when a phone has a delay and you find yourself stultified, unable to speak…or chat rooms when the delay makes nonsense of the conversations…
This BBC One Twitter board reminds me of PlasticBag Tom’s social telly watching mock-up, an idea that I still think has legs. The BBC site should let me create a space on top of their Twitter space so that as well as babbling on in real time in-tune to the programs, I and my friends could too. It’d be like been able to heckle the shows with your friends as audience/fellow hecklers.
The Wallright project actually takes another collaborative painting tool and makes it appear on a real wall. I like this idea… and this one rations your paint, presumably to limit vandalisation… but it instantly feels like you are working under a miserly teacher not handing out the red and pink because of what they might draw. The colour palette is too limited… and again, the drawing experience is horrible.
It seems that as someone else paints, my strokes are taken off… which is interesting, like there’s a finite amount of paint that keeps getting recycled.
The lack of ability to keep a bit of the canvas for yourself is a shame… if this was a real wall I could at least use my elbows to keep you from messing my bit up.
I’d forgotten about this drawing-based image search engine (retrievr). You paint what you want… and it fetches similar images. I painted an Apple and got this. This would be really interesting for porn… perhaps generating a whole new collection of primitive art works that would describe our collective sexuality. At worst you’d have an hilarious comic to which people could suggest captions.
I’d love this site to…
- work with Flickr or Google images, more is always better.
- Be able to take text input such as tags, more modalities is often better
- Work with a collaborative site such as the ones above, more people can be better if done well.
- Show a list of recent searches/drawings
Hi Tom – Thanks for the attention. Sorry we don’t have private boards working yet – it would address some of the issues you raise.
We are also fans of collaborative drawing – and we think in pre-existing groups that trust each other, it will work well. (Think you and your friends who doodle). It might even work in the public space… providing we deliver wiki-style rollback tools and community management, and require registration.
Of course, there is more use for doodleboard as an actual whiteboard… think about the whiteboards in people’s offices – they don’t have collaboration rules – people respect and trust each other. That is how we ultimately see doodleboard working, in existing groups.
Thanks again – and sorry the tools aren’t perfect yet! We want them to be too – hard when we are still bootstrapping.
~Abe