Sometimes, just sometimes, technology does things that actually do make life a little easier. Last night was one of those times.

We work with a web developer who lives in Canada. He and I communicate frequently via Skype. For those of you who don’t know, Skype is a free, easy-to-use audio/video/text conferencing tool with exceptional sound quality and pretty decent video. It’s also got some nice features like the ability to call traditional phone numbers, give yourself a portable phone number regular phones can dial (with voice mail), massive, multi-person audio conference capability, and lots of other things you may already know about. At any rate, it’s worthy of a whole post in itself (whole books have been written on it, for that matter).

Anyway, last night the Calgary-based web developer and I were talking on Skype. I was trying to explain one of those things that’s just a little clearer with an illustration. I recalled a web-based whiteboard I saw a few months back called Thinkature and suggested we give it a try. I pasted the URL into Skype’s text chat window for easy access.

Within about 60 seconds he was signed into his new Thinkature account and at the shared whiteboard I’d created. In no more than five minutes we’d each drawn a diagram of what we were trying to explain to one another, and in turn probably saved at least a day’s worth of costly development time. If either of us needs to be reminded of the decisions we made, it’s just a matter of going back to the whiteboard for a review. We could also print copies for posterity (or print them to PDF for sharing with others).

The best part of all is that everything we used was free, easy to use, and flexible. I like tools like this where I can pick and choose based on the learning and communication styles of the person at the other end–just from these two tools I could choose from audio, video, text, and a whiteboard, and mix-and-match as needed. Thinkature may be missing some drawing features its more established, expensive competiion features, but it is surprisingly robust for what it is, and the limited feature set makes the initial learning curve very shallow.

I recommend trying tools like these the next time you’ve got a meeting. Even if the person you’re meeting with is right next door, try firing up Skype and launching Thinkature. It’ll make good practice for the next time you need to interface with someone at the other end of the country.

Tags: collaboration, skype, thinkature