Finally: Facebook Co-Founder Opens the Curtain on Two-Year Old Asana

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/07/finally-facebook-co-founder-opens-the-curtain-on-two-year-old-asana/

by atularora • 15 years ago

102 56 15 years ago

Looks like they aren't big fans of MVPs.

bpeters• 15 years ago

Well I guess when you have a track record like Facebook, you think people will just believe that your product will work and rock...

richcollins2• 15 years ago

I think that you're confusing a marketing launch with an MVP. They've had businesses using it for months iirc.

bretthellman2• 15 years ago

I don't agree. Spending a year building a technology for an unproven product is not MVP :)

danilocampos• 15 years ago

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• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years 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• 15 years 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.

jackstahl3• 15 years 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...

collypops• 15 years 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• 15 years 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.

endlessvoid94• 15 years ago

I had to stop watching the video because the audio was WAY ahead of the video. He started talking about the product and it still showed him talking about speed and structure.

How did that slip through?

kloncks• 15 years ago

Regardless of the actual demo, this is a very important task and I like how Lacy described their aspirations:

There’s that almost hubristic mission: To fix how people work together and make the global work place a better, more efficient, less frustrating place.

I like that.

windsurfer2• 15 years ago

This seems almost exactly the same as Redmine so far, but I wasn't able to get through the hour-long rambly and out-of-sync video. Anyone know the differences?

jpadvo• 15 years ago

It also seems the same as Action Method. I can't see any difference.

bretthopper• 15 years ago

Listening to him describe the "follow" feature like it was revolutionary made me roll my eyes since Redmine has had this forever.

sfphotoarts• 15 years ago

wow, if they didn't come from such big companies I doubt anyone would pay the slightest attention, the idea alone makes me want to yawn, then I started watching the video and gave up.

How many times have people come up with these super new way to make people collaborate better, only to find that it doesn't work. The last innovation in this field that made any real impact on team collaboration was in the 70's - email.

rguzman• 15 years ago

I think it is fair to say that 37s had some impact on this with basecamp, also. Of course, not of the same order of magnitude as email -- but, email took ~20 years to be widely adopted and accepted.

pinguar• 15 years ago

As far as I could bear with the unsynced video, it looks like they are trying to catch customers who are used to use Google Wave for project management/collaboration..

georgemcbay• 15 years ago

>> "it looks like they are trying to catch customers who are used to use Google Wave"

Both of them?

Maro3• 15 years ago

Some random responses:

- It's Google Wave, this time by ex-Facebookers!

- Software that messes with my email sucks.

- It looks complicated.

- People use text files and whiteboards because you can wipe it and start over and draw and connect stuff and use colors and...

- If their plan is to build something sexy and get acquired, they'll probably succeed just because of their Facebook past.

- If their plan is to build a product and live off it, they'll probably pull it off because most other software sucks so bad and is limited.

- But, based on the video, they won't fundamentally "solve" the problem they're attacking, their software will just be another context (like text files, stickies, emails, wikies, bug tracking, etc.)

- Investors always ask at the end of your pitch, "How are you different than X?" and "Why will you succeed where X has failed?". I didn't really see the answer in this video.

- Their virality plan sounds interesting in the context of Enterprise Software.

Hopefully I'm wrong!

rumpelstiltskin2• 15 years ago

What virality plan?

Maro3• 15 years ago

About 3/4th into the video the guy says they're planning to attack companies from the bottom-up by designing for, allowing and enabling individual employees to start using it by themselves and then share their stuff. I think even if their software fails, if they can come up with a model for this that works, that would be a big deal and enable other startups. I know I'm already thinking about this.

At least, that's what I got from fast-forwarding, it's an hour long presentation.

wslh• 15 years ago

Yes, I don't get it either. Ozzie's Groove was more revolutionary.

rosenstein• 15 years ago

fyi, TechCrunch is working on the sync issues now...

rumpelstiltskin2• 15 years ago

Are they also working on a tl;dw?

P.S. Justin Rosenstein? Co-founder of Asana?

jackstahl3• 15 years ago

Yes, that was JR.

For a tl;dw, try http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-cofounder-shows-what...

zwadia• 15 years ago

This seems like a cross between:

Facebook (layout/feeds) Twitter (async assign) Intentional Software (multiple representations, same model) Google Wave (live updates, email integration)

athom• 15 years ago

Without looking at the page/video (And after what everyone else has said, pleeeeze don't tell me I have to?! ;), does this sound anything like that Chandler project[1] they wrote about in Dreaming in Code[2]?

[1] http://chandlerproject.org/ Looks like they finally made it to a version 1.

[2] http://www.dreamingincode.com/

krakensden2• 15 years ago

Yup, it sounds like a hosted, web-based Chandler, although they seem to be moving faster.

gojomo• 15 years ago

That is Mitch Kapor shown sitting in the front row of the demo audience.

podperson• 15 years ago

One of the things that's kind of interesting to consider w.r.t. Facebook vs. Asana (where Asana is assumed to be some kind of unholy amalgamation of a wiki, exchange server, basecamp, MS project, and ... Things, say):

Facebook is kind of an _anti_-productivity application. Taking the Facebook approach to developing a "live in it" productivity application would be something of a disaster. I've been using using Facebook (fairly lightly, I'll admit) for years and still don't understand its structure. E.g. when I'm told "so and so" has made a comment on my wall or replied to a post or liked something -- I'm not sure where those things are to be found.

In the end, most serious people "live" in their email inbox to some extent or other (modulo some kind of discipline for not checking it too often or whatever) and anything that doesn't wrap around email is essentially a waste of time.

A tool that wrapped around email, [shared] calendar, [shared] to-do-list, [specialized reddit-like forums, and a wiki might have a shot (is this what asana is? I have no clue). This seems like something "easy" for Google or Microsoft to do (since they have pretty compelling email infrastructure) and impossible for anyone who isn't able and willing to do something 80%+ as good as gmail to do.

rkalla• 15 years ago

I thought building of the straw man of "people use Notepad" was slightly inaccurate and unnecessary - the software looks very slick on its own.

Yes Basecamp and nameless other pieces of software might already do this, but you could argue this is Bugzilla with a nice flashy Ajax interface on top of it... technically I suppose it is, but the Ajax interface is really functional. I would say as impressive as Gmail was to us when it came out -- keyboard short cuts, drag and drop, intelligent email parsing, tagging/grouping/slicing/dicing.

This is like some marriage between Basecamp, Find Bugz and a Customer Support app all married together.

tastybites• 15 years ago

The headline makes it sound like he had an illegitimate child!

obiefernandez• 15 years ago

Finally, someone made a collaborative, web-based version of Things (fantastic, but solo-only GTD application for Mac).

I'm excited.

bluedevil2k• 15 years ago

If Moskovitz has more more than God, why does he need funding?

robryan• 15 years ago

Maybe he doesn't want to cash out of Facebook till an IPO.

krakensden2• 15 years ago

he's not liquid, of course. It's mostly in Facebook stock, which isn't practical to sell.

watdufa• 15 years ago

omg. How can the same mind who writes and deliveres such a rambling, unfocused talk also produce a useful task manager?

Atlassian might want to pay attention to this, but I think 37 signals is safe from any real competition.

waxman• 15 years ago

Whatever you want to say about the actual app, Luna, their new framework, looks awesome.[1]

The idea is basically that complex web 2.0 design patterns (ajax/comet/memcache/sql optimization/etc.) require a lot of tedious effort to build and maintain, and wouldn't it be cool if you could simply define models, views, and handler functions, and then have the framework take care of everything else.

I honestly think that Luna has the potential to change web development the way Rails did (i.e. by making it an order of magnitude easier), and could transform web apps themselves the way G-mail did (i.e. by emphasizing things like really-real time updating via comet the way G-mail initially introduced the world to Ajax).

I have no idea how Luna is architected, but the concept really resonates with me: javascript-based, web 2.0-abstractions that prevent repetitive things I do in Rails like having to redefine some of the same functions in ruby code and javascript code, and then having to manually keep them in sync.

It's so cool that I think I'm going to try to hack together my own, humble Luna knock-off built on top of Node.js, jQuery, and MongoDB (which uses a javascript query language and JSON-but-better (BSON) data models).

[1]http://asana.com/luna/

mnutt• 15 years ago

Isn't this one of the promises of Lift, the scala framework?

phatterhead• 15 years ago

I kind of thought this was the real point of the app. They have an idea for a great not-Ruby framework and investors said "platform plays are non-starters...build an app".

shaggy• 15 years ago

I may have missed this answer but how to they actually plan to survive as a company since they are giving the product away? Will you pay them for support or will they start charging for the solutions to the "longer term" problems they describe which salesforce solves today? I could be stupid or naive but why have otherwise smart people invested $9M into this?

michaeldhopkins• 15 years ago

Free to use in a freeform manner, but companies will pay to set policies etc.

tuckbuck• 15 years ago

bASecAmp+zeNdesk+wAve = ASANA

clare• 15 years ago

I may have missed it, but from the video it is not clear how Asana targets improving productivity for each specific business role. Through my experience the adoption of such tools highly depends on your role in the business org: e.g. Yammer may be very appealing to a marketing/bizdev guy, but not so much to an engineer. Wonder how this more generic approach can work out to fit the need of everyone.

mark_l_watson• 15 years ago

Looks cool. I just signed up for the beta - hope to get to kick the tires.

NonOrthodox• 15 years ago

Wow, just wow... Not only Asana surprised me as aparently an awesome productivity tool that I hope I might use in my start-up really soon, but the bunch of stupid comments here also surprised me.

The video is long, but you can get a good grasp of the product in the first few minutes. The rest of the video is in-depth discussion on how they started thinking of how to do it, how they think they will reach the companies and also inner workings on how the software work.

windsurfer2• 15 years ago

Can you explain why you would use this over, say, Redmine or Basecamp?

Finally: Facebook Co-Founder Opens the Curtain on Two-Year Old Asana

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