flowgram – a different sort of screencast

Have you ever picked up the phone, called a friend or colleague and said ‘go to xyz web site’ and then tried to say things like “click on that link at the top left”. “no not that one, the other big yellow button”, “see that thingie at the bottom” and so on. I have and it can be frustrating.

Flowgram is an interesting new service that I found out about today thanks to Greg Schwartz. It falls somewhere in the realm of screencasting services, though maybe we need a new term for this type of tool. (Maybe there already is a term?)

With Flowgram, you open up web pages, add highlighting to point out different parts of the page and add a narration to the pages. All this is done with live web pages.

When you share this with others, they see the live web pages with your highlighting in their browser window, with a small toolbar at the top of the window with  start and pause controls. What’s really intriguing, and a bit confusing at first, is the ability to stop the presentation, go off and explore the web pages that are on the screen and then return to the Flowgram to resume the presentation.

I haven’t created any Flowgrams myself. The service is still in an invite-only beta version.  I’ll be curious to see how this service develops. I can see it being very useful for quick instruction and sharing of content with others.

Greg’s Flowgram showing some tips on using FriendFeed.

And another Flowgram – this on one What is a Flowgram.