Blogging Present.ly

We have officially opened Present.ly to the public!

You can sign up for an account at the plans page. All accounts come with 60-day trials (you don’t even need a credit card), so what are you waiting for? Get in the Present.ly!

If you still need a little more information about what Present.ly is and how it works, we have just added a videos page with a new screencast.

Thanks for your interest, and we look forward to seeing many of you as users in the near future.

In Present.ly you can “broadcast” messages as a group or as the system. That is, an administrator can create a message that comes “from” the system and is visible to everyone. Similarly, a group manager can broadcast an update that comes “from” the group. Here’s a shortcast demonstrating the feature:

While this is great to use in the application, it has even more use through the Present.ly API. For instance, a software team could tie a post-commit hook to broadcast to a group for the project, instantly updating all members of the team that a new commit has been pushed to the repository. It can also be used for meeting reminders and a number of things we probably haven’t thought of yet!

Over the next couple of days leading up to our launch, we are going to try to put together a few short screencasts (thus “shortcast”) highlighting some of the cool features of Present.ly. Up first is Media Sharing!

A man called Yahtzee created a series of video game reviews called Zero Punctuation that combine a simple art and animation style with fast-talking commentary. When we wanted to create a video to pitch Present.ly for the TechCruch50, we thought it might be fun to do it in a similar style. It would be a waste to just let it gather dust on our hard drives, so here it is:

Removing my tongue from my cheek for a moment, we have been really excited to see some of the feedback on Twitter and around the web. Launch day can’t come soon enough!

Last night when Yammer won the TechCrunch50, our interest was more than a little piqued. Today we’re officially taking the wraps off of Present.ly, our “Twitter for Businesses” product that we’ve been working on in stealth mode for the last several months and are launching on September 16 at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

It’s great to see that short-form communication for businesses is so promising as to win top honors at such a competitive conference. We’re extremely passionate about the field because it has the potential to really transform how people communicate inside an organization. So congratulations are in order to the Yammer team for bringing so much exposure to the field.

One of the reasons that we were so surprised to see Yammer among the TechCrunch50 is because Present.ly was submitted to be included as well! Unfortunately, we never got the chance to demo our product for the TC50 experts (something that was supposed to be part of the process). We didn’t receive a clear response back as to why, but it would have been great to have the chance to go head-to-head with Yammer in the preliminaries of TechCrunch50 or on stage at the conference.

It’s Still On, Though

Be that as it may, it’s certainly been a shot of adrenaline for our team to have a surprise competitor mere days before we are set to launch. We’ve had some time to examine Yammer, and we’re ready for some competition! So how do they stack up against each other?

Security and Control: Present.ly is built to be an official means of communication for a business, rather than an ad-hoc network of employees. User accounts on Present.ly are created only through administrator invitations, and accounts are secured using SSL encryption.

Collaboration: Present.ly has hash tags, like Yammer. But it also has groups, private messaging, and media/file sharing built in. We built Present.ly from the ground up to have powerful features tailored specifically for business use. Present.ly accounts can also be extended beyond a single e-mail domain, allowing you to include clients, consultants and other collaborators effortlessly.

Platform Approach: Starting from day one Present.ly has an API that is fully compatible with the Twitter REST API. This means that existing Twitter applications can work instantly with Present.ly with almost no modification. Through the API, Present.ly can easily integrate with all parts of your business.

The Power of Context: Present.ly automatically analyzes each post for context, automatically separating out questions, replies, and urgent messages. Our robust notifications system allows you to receive updates via E-Mail, SMS, and IM based on this context.

We’re really proud of Present.ly and think that it can enable great new things for companies of all sizes, from 5 employees to 50,000. On September 16, get ready to start using the REAL Twitter for Business.

Welcome to Blogging Present.ly, the official blog for Present.ly! We’re still getting ready for our launch at the Web 2.0 Expo on Tuesday, September 16, but we wanted to raise the curtains a bit to give everyone a peek of what’s in store.

Please take a look at the tour page to get an idea of what we’re all about, and we’re looking forward to seeing what people have to say about our work.