So Mr Webb and I have been playing with Hydra for a couple of days, trying to find uses for it and trying to get other people engaged in its use (with the hope that in the process we’ll come to some decent first-stage conclusions). Standard disclaimer here – all decent insights are collaborative in origin, all mistakes entirely my own.
First things first, for those of you who have come in late – what is Hydra. Essentially, it’s two (or more) people fiddling with the same document from two different computers at the same time with each being able to see what the other is doing. If you’re on the same network, then you can find documents to work on over Rendezvous. Otherwise (if you know your IP and are not trapped behind an unforgiving firewall) you can join with documents over the net.
Our first impressions weren’t entirely favourable. It may have been easy enough to connect to a shared document, but once there – what to do? We found ourselves using the first document in a peculiar inscribing way – kind of writing on it an ongoing discussion but in a non-linear graffiti kind of style. It reminded me a lot of those pictures you do when you’re a child where you draw a plane and then another plane and then you draw a missile coming from one plane and then you draw it hitting the other one, and then you turn that plane into an explosion and then you draw a little man in a parachute flying down to earth…
Starting a document from scratch, it seemed, was to be an almost impossible enterprise. The document itself kept getting lost within our debate about it. Later we would adopt the slightly odd approach of having two shared documents open at the same time – one as our newly discovered chat-graffiti-wall, the other for actual work on a document. The Apple key depressed with the ` made a relatively convenient way to skip between windows. But even with this approach in place, it became difficult to find a way of pulling the first initial strands of a document together. It was almost like you needed a separate scratch-pad incorporated into the program so you could push a piece of work a certain amount down the line towards completion before exposing it to your colleagues…
Working with code or mostly finished documents was a hell of a lot easier and more productive – and I think this is something we’ll probably find ourselves doing again in the daily course of our work. Keeping the two window model (one for debate / one for editing) we played for a while with a weblog post – amending it as we felt appropriate – bashing it more cleanly into place. The most useful feature here (weirdly) was one of the most simple – the ability to select a piece of text with a sweep of your cursor and then go, “that bit there needs a change” or “I love the turn of phrase” in the other window. That simple act of gesturing to a passage was tremendously liberating.
Finally Matt pulled the HTML source of a standard plasticbag.org page out and slapped it in the window – which turned into a debate about embedded RDF and Trackback. We could have been using it to understand why a page wasn’t rendering correctly or to debug or debate the correct syntax in any individual spot – or even (if we used a more literary or commentative text) simply as a medium for discussion – like being able use a laser pointer to signal a dubious passage and have your colleague know exactly what you were talking about even though he was on the other side of the room / city / planet…
First Impressions: I still can’t quite decide whether Hydra feels like a tiny niche application with some surprisingly significant uses or whether it should be considered a slightly clunky prototype of something almost world-changing. Certainly I’ll watch it with considerable interest and I recommend it to anyone interested in collaborating online…