As part of our neverending quest to become the premier presentation sharing community on the web I am thrilled to finally introduce SlideSix Labs. As you've probably guessed, SlideSix Labs is a place where new bleeding edge features, technologies and enhancements will be introduced to our users for testing before the features are rolled out to all of our members. The first two features to launch in labs are sure to be well received by users who are serious about creating impressive presentations on the web - Presentation Analytics and Collaborate.

Presentation Analytics gives users the ability to determine the effectiveness of the presentations that they share on SlideSix by letting them see detailed traffic statistics in a format that is easy to read and interpret. This feature provides detailed statistics about your presentations - how many times it has been viewed, how many unique views, average time a user spends viewing your presentation. The data is presented in a simple and clean manor. A graph plots view data over time and a simple datagrid shows details for both the presentation itself as well as individual slides and external media. Slide level data gives you the unique ability to determine the most effective slides in your presentation. Armed with such data users will be able to improve future presentations by modifying content based on what formats seem to work best with their audience. This features eliminates guesswork since you can quickly and easily determine how deep into your presentation users go and how much time they spend on your content. Presentation Analytics is built upon the Google Analytics Data Export API so users can be confident that the data is accurate. This feature is made possible by Analytics for Flash and Flex. We began analytics tracking for individual slides in late April so any presentation that was uploaded or viewed within the last month should contain enough data to begin immediate analysis. I'll blog more on the technical aspects of this feature in a future post. Collaborate gives users the ability to share and discuss presentations with other users. With Collaborate you can create a unique custom real time chat room that contains a simplified slide viewer where users can share and discuss their slides with other users who also have access to the Collaborate feature. Creating a Collaborate session is simple. You can either select 'Collaborate' within the presentation 'Options' menu in the Management Console. or you can click the link below any presentation on SlideSix. Just send your custom URL to another Collaborate user and begin sharing! Collaborate takes advantage of the Data Messaging Gateway in ColdFusion for near real time data push. I also hope to blog more technical details of this feature in the near future. The following presentation introduces Labs and demonstrates the new features: SlideSix continues to be an innovative industry leader in presentation sharing. It is our vision to provide users with meaningful solutions that are simple to use. Visit SlideSix Labs to learn more and request access to these powerful features. User feedback is critical in helping us troubleshoot any potential bugs and further enhance these features.