Judith Meskill Judith Meskill turned me on to Pepper Computer's newly announced Pepper Keeper, a consumer oriented collaboration system that leverages instant messaging.

The collaborative metaphor is shared albums in which pages can hold various sorts of information, such as photos, MP3 files, homework, and whatever.

Collaboration is based on IM. I could pass along my photo album to an AIM buddy, who would them be able to see the photos in his own photo album. The tool automatically imports your AIM buddy list into its Buddy album, and you can annotate the buddy info with email addresses, photos, and so on (but it doesn't try to jibe this info with Outlook, which would have been a nice shortcut). Pepper Keeper also has a local IM network for Pepper users in a shared LAN.

The company's pricing approach is interesting. The dowload of Pepper Keeper is free (currently), and that initial dowload includes a few sample applications. However, with the exception of the MP3 album, all the other albums provided has a limited number of pages. Once these are used, you must return to the online store to download more pages.

At the moment I wonder if the IM-based collaboration provided is rich enough to warrant paying the price for the pages. Paying $4.99 for 25 photos in a sharable album is steep, when I can post them for free at a blog (like www.textamerica.com). I think the company will have to drastically drop prices -- like 250 pages for $4.99 -- if it is going to make it.