Testing out Yackpack - a group ‘voice’ collaboration tool

17/12/2007 by nicola.

Yackpack is an application which allows you to record asynchronous voice messages or live audio with a pack - which can be a private group of people - invitation only, or a public pack. A pack looks like a circle with boxes (photos optional) inside it of all the people in your pack/group. You have the option to type text as well and you send messages by clicking on photos of people you want to send messages to.

So far, what I like
ease of use - 1 click to everything - to talk to a group or one person or 1 click to use from my page on internettime on ning

Group feature, everyone can see everyone’s messages if they want - does this help communication, quickly finding stuff ? You can view messages by person but presumably as this grows you might like a folder/filing feature. There is not a way to record messages directly from the application at the moment but you can do it using Audacity or similar (but would need to be fairly confident with recording stuff to do it). You can’t search messages but so far I don’t need to.

1 click for live talk if you want or on another page via walkie talkie or you can embed your yackpack as a small flash object into a web page, as above. I can click on it once to talk to anyone in my ‘pack’

Quality of audio is superb, so clear.

don’t have to download an application

What i don’t like:
paying a subscription fee (although they have explained their reasoning as having an ad-free environment chosen by previous yackpack users), when VOIP is free (e.g. Skype)

I can’t use this on my mobile phone (yet) which is my main ‘talking’ device (phone 60%, pc 40% at the moment I think)

Limited amount of users for a community - can only have 100 people in one pack

No video

With live feature, can’t see names of who is online with the walkietalkie one, just numbers, so say if I was in the internettime community and wanted to see who was online, would need to click back to the main page (on Ning, who is online is shown with green dot) then click back to my page and make a guess about which of the people in green. However, if you embed your pack as a widget, a shiny ‘bar’ under the picture will indicate if they are online, so can tell this way.

Yackpack as a name - for business, find it a bit strange to think of a group as a pack (as previous dog owner, tend to think of packs as groups of animals)

Other thoughts
I messed up when I first set up the pack - just went straight in there and started clicking everything without looking at any of the tutorials so managed to send a few blank messages to myself - haven’t been able to delete so far so finding the actual messages if going through whole list is taking a while - but hopefully this is just ‘teething’ problems.

Can’t actually figure out why the audio is so good and how they are managing the live audio too, everything is under patent according to their about us page, would be useful to know what is behind it.

Is voice better or is it just unnecessary when you can have live chat via text. I think its more useful, once you have posted a few messages and ‘warmed up’, your communication is becoming more and more natural (not many people can type everything that they are thinking as easily as they can speak it), so it should be better. Is YackPack suitable as a business collaboration tool - I’m still going with yes at the moment but I would be looking for more functionality in terms of organisation of messages, adding pictures or attachments into conversations for longer term use I think.

Going to keep using it for a while and see how it is working out. There are education ‘packs’ which have classrooms as packs and it seems to produce lively collaboration.

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