Workstreaming with Present.ly
Having fled the cubicle jungle of Corporate America, we have a strong distaste for status reports. That’s not to say we don’t believe in letting others on the team know what we’re doing. We just prefer to workstream our activities and let our work announce itself to the rest of the team.
Present.ly - our workstreaming tool
I hate to put Present.ly in a box by calling it “Twitter for Business” (because it is so much more than that), but that’s the easiest way to describe it.
Familiar Twitter feel
If you’re comfortable using Twitter, you’ll feel at home with Present.ly because it supports @replies, direct messages, and hashtags.
Questions and urgent messages
Present.ly adds some smarts to the display of messages or “tweets.” Messages that end in a question mark are displayed as questions to the group: 
Need to mark a message as urgent? Simply add three exclamation marks: 
Private and secure
Unlike Twitter, only your users see your messages.
Groups!
I really hope Twitter builds functionality for groups one day and when they do, I hope they rip off Present.ly’s implementation. Admins control who belongs to what groups. Perhaps the coolest feature of Present.ly groups is the broadcast. Broadcasts are like direct messages to a group except they are displayed as if sent from the group itself, which gets its own avatar. The following broadcast message
b system Elvis has left the building
would display as if it came from the System itself: 
How we use it
Much of our Present.ly use is still manual. We tweet each other questions and comments just like we do on Twitter. In fact, Present.ly let’s you cross-post to twitter by using the t! command:
t! This message would go to Twitter, too!
But, increasingly, we’ve automated much of our workstreaming by sending broadcast messages at certain points in our development cycle.
Source control checkins
One of the most important things we do as a development team is add code to source control. We use “GitHub”:http://github.com for our code repositories. GitHub has a nifty feature called Service Hooks, which allows you to send a message to a number of third party services for code commits to your repo. Setting up Present.ly really easy:
Once set up, GitHub will send a new broadcast message from the group you specify with each new code push. The message includes the commit message and a link to the commit back on GitHub:
Deploy notices
Before Present.ly we had been sending our deployment notices to Campfire using Tinder. While this works well, we really preferred to have our workstream in one spot and leav eour Campfires for discussion and chat. Since Present.ly implements the Twitter API, wiring up the deploy notices from Capistrano was a piece of cake.
Now everybody knows when the build is done:
How are you using it?
We’d love to hear how you’re using Present.ly in your workflow? Any cool uses we’re missing?
