Jybe 2.0 is Here (RIP VR)

Jybe 2.0

I’ve had an ongoing dialog with Brian at Jybe and today (Sunday) he asked me to take a look at Jybe 2.0 with him. Amidst my parsing of XML and pondering a paper on iPodder, Brian and I spent about 30 minutes looking at the new plug in and discussing how librarians might use Jybe to co-browse with users or each other (I see a big future for training and staff development this way- I could conduct a brief tutorial on a databse from my desk with a librarian at a branch! Our most cool staff dev librarian at SJCPL gets it too!).

So what’s HOT about Jybe 2.0:

An intuitive Create Session that features a Notify button so you can invite folks to your jybe session via email.

An asterisk appears next to each user’s name in the chat interface to signify their browser is still loading the page – it disappears when the page is loaded.

Scrolling capability for cobrowsers

Uploadable presentations — PPT, XLS, DOC, etc — with super fact refresh rates ( I was able to upload “21st Century Libraries” from my Mac, click through some slides and then surf right over to KCPL to illustrate a point!)

Jybe does not support uploading images yet, but we were able to get into a gallery so I could show him a picture of the boys.

We surfed over to SJCPL and got into the catalog, where Brian searched for a book with me. We were also able to get into a database, search, click on a PDF and download it to both machines!

Finally, we trotted over to wikipedia and edited an entry TOGETHER. We couldn’t type at the same time — like Aaron and I do with Sub Etha Edit on our Macs — but how cool is that? Collaborative real time blogging and wiki anyone?

Brian says 2.0 will be ready sometime this week so keep an eye out for it and test it yourself. I am intrigued as usual by something that seems so simple to use that could make the VR folks sit up and take notice. Some questions for libraries pondering a Jybe-based VR service: will your users download a plug-in? Can we make it easy for them to do so? Can we use Jybe in-house for development and training?

I’m pondering Sherri’s words: “the ’embedded’ service concept: provide help for people where and when they use it most.” Is Jybe imbedded enough or can it made to be so users will automatically have it or not think twice about adding on to their systems.

Update: Jybe 2.0 is out!