Jybe Brings Back a Late, Great Idea

There was a time when "follow me" browsing tools made it easy to share Web content, but those products were subsumed by larger Web applications. Advanced Reality has revived follow-me browsing—via Jybe, a free plug-in for Microsofts Internet Explorer and extension for Mozillas Firefox—with a free presentation service tacked on.

I like how Jybe works: Starting sessions is easy—users joining a session just need to know the session name the creator chose. Anyone with the plug-in or extension can create or join a session, and I found that Firefox attendees could follow a session created in Internet Explorer and vice versa.

Sessions are managed by Advanced Realitys servers, although companies can deploy a management server in-house.

Another useful feature of Jybe is that servers can host PowerPoint presentations, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets converted to HTML format for driving hosted presentations .

When sharing presentations, however, the service has a couple of notable limitations. Presentation files cant exceed 1.5MB, and I found that presentations didnt always display as expected in Firefox. I also needed to distribute the session password to attendees via e-mail. Once inside a session, no user is a leader, so presenters have to hope attendees dont jump ahead and bring everyone else along.

More information is available at www.advancedreality.com.

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