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A very rambly video. That's cool, that's what the journalists are for. Hopefully the article can boil it down for me. "I won’t belabor the features and screen

A very rambly video. That's cool, that's what the journalists are for. Hopefully the article can boil it down for me. "I won’t belabor the features and screen shots here. Hear the pitch from the founders yourself." ...Oh. The author could have added a lot more value by actually describing the product and its differentiating characteristics. (edit: Ohhh! Is it uncharitable to assume she couldn't sit through the video either? Maybe she doesn't know yet.) Instead, the post waxed philosophical, at great length, about a bunch of things tangential and ultimately irrelevant to what the hell it is they've actually made. It's left as an exercise to the reader to slog through a loose, one hour video to figure out why this matters. I don't mean to be a grumpy gus, but how do people get paid to do such sloppy, self-indulgent work? Anyone have a tl;dr on the magic and rainbows delivered by Asana? (Hunch/spoiler: Basecamp plus complexity, splitviews, more AJAX, a non-2004 design)

petervandijck 16y ago
I got tired with the video as well. Basically looks pretty complicated. They're thinking they'll replace what people currently use (notepad etc). I don't think so.
- flashgordon 16y ago
  well id say you were lucky. The video was down when I got there, and I just couldnt sit through the very generic descriptions the article was rambling about.
notahacker 16y ago
Video is down for fixing so the somewhat vague descriptions on Techcrunch and the Asana blog are left to paint an equally confusing picture. Free enterprise services that aim to do everything seems to be the general idea. A talking point would be the period between angel funding (Apr 09) and testing the first incarnation with the first beta customer (Jun 10), especially when the team appear to have very little experience of the arcane business processes and technological incompetence of the average enterprise. Using Facebook Connect as a [temporary] login solution according to their beta signup page sounds like the first inexplicably crazy decision. On the plus side, the screenshot that replaced the video looks much prettier than most enterprise apps, the team is obviously really smart people and their proprietary webapp scripting language sounds like it could be at least as interesting as the product when it's released into the wild...
Charuru 16y ago
The key point to Asana is that unlike basecamp, the info you put onto Asana is firstly meant for you. It's your personal todo, your personal notes, your personal calendar. They make it easy, "low latency", to update your data on Asana so that you will do it readily. The difference is, when someone updates Basecamp, they're updating the team. They're actively trying to communicate and tell other people what's going on. That's work, that's annoying, people don't want to do that, and the info in Basecamp becomes unreliable and prone to be dated. But if you're updating your personal data, people do that all the time. Just in this case your personal data is also shared across your organization so that other people know what's going on at the same time. They pair this with good access controls so that larger groups can share data frictionlessly.
- Alex3917 16y ago
  Combing PIM with groupware is obviously a good idea, as is reducing the cognitive overhead, but I feel like this is a miss. It would be much better if it were A) desktop software and B) designed for users with 2+ monitors. This looks like it might be better than basecamp, but I have trouble seeing it really beating out notepad or FreeMind. What I really want is FreeMind for PIM and groupware on one monitor, and on the second monitor structured data about nodes and appended conversations. Having all that on one screen just isn't useable, especially as a web app.
jackstahl 16y ago
Your hunch isn't so far off. Here's an article that contains more of a product summary: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-cofounder-shows-what-hes-been-up-to-with-asana-2011-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-cofounder-shows-what...
collypops 16y ago
I think I may have spent so much time listening to Rosenstein that I ended up not knowing anything by the end of the video. There were far too many tech-hipster soundbytes which obscured the real value of the product. Thankfully I was able to read up on it at a few other sources, and watch the live demo bits with the sound off and get a better picture. Overall it looks like a useful app, which offers a few of the things that I'd like to see in Jira.
dhimes 16y ago
Thanks for steering me away. Fortunately your comment was leading the top thread when I got here so I didn't waste my time.

petervandijck 16y ago

I got tired with the video as well. Basically looks pretty complicated. They're thinking they'll replace what people currently use (notepad etc). I don't think so.

flashgordon 16y ago
well id say you were lucky. The video was down when I got there, and I just couldnt sit through the very generic descriptions the article was rambling about.

notahacker 16y ago

Video is down for fixing so the somewhat vague descriptions on Techcrunch and the Asana blog are left to paint an equally confusing picture. Free enterprise services that aim to do everything seems to be the general idea. A talking point would be the period between angel funding (Apr 09) and testing the first incarnation with the first beta customer (Jun 10), especially when the team appear to have very little experience of the arcane business processes and technological incompetence of the average enterprise. Using Facebook Connect as a [temporary] login solution according to their beta signup page sounds like the first inexplicably crazy decision. On the plus side, the screenshot that replaced the video looks much prettier than most enterprise apps, the team is obviously really smart people and their proprietary webapp scripting language sounds like it could be at least as interesting as the product when it's released into the wild...

Charuru 16y ago

The key point to Asana is that unlike basecamp, the info you put onto Asana is firstly meant for you. It's your personal todo, your personal notes, your personal calendar. They make it easy, "low latency", to update your data on Asana so that you will do it readily. The difference is, when someone updates Basecamp, they're updating the team. They're actively trying to communicate and tell other people what's going on. That's work, that's annoying, people don't want to do that, and the info in Basecamp becomes unreliable and prone to be dated. But if you're updating your personal data, people do that all the time. Just in this case your personal data is also shared across your organization so that other people know what's going on at the same time. They pair this with good access controls so that larger groups can share data frictionlessly.

Alex3917 16y ago
Combing PIM with groupware is obviously a good idea, as is reducing the cognitive overhead, but I feel like this is a miss. It would be much better if it were A) desktop software and B) designed for users with 2+ monitors. This looks like it might be better than basecamp, but I have trouble seeing it really beating out notepad or FreeMind. What I really want is FreeMind for PIM and groupware on one monitor, and on the second monitor structured data about nodes and appended conversations. Having all that on one screen just isn't useable, especially as a web app.

jackstahl 16y ago

Your hunch isn't so far off. Here's an article that contains more of a product summary: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-cofounder-shows-what-hes-been-up-to-with-asana-2011-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-cofounder-shows-what...

collypops 16y ago

I think I may have spent so much time listening to Rosenstein that I ended up not knowing anything by the end of the video. There were far too many tech-hipster soundbytes which obscured the real value of the product. Thankfully I was able to read up on it at a few other sources, and watch the live demo bits with the sound off and get a better picture. Overall it looks like a useful app, which offers a few of the things that I'd like to see in Jira.

dhimes 16y ago

Thanks for steering me away. Fortunately your comment was leading the top thread when I got here so I didn't waste my time.