by Jon Husband
March 4, 2009 at 12:29 am
· Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Web 2.0, Web Apps
.. and an essential tool in turning flows of information into useful and applicable knowledge.
This would not be the first time I (and many others) have said this, but here’s a new post on the TechCrunch blog that strongly reinforces that prediction.
People have been using IM in the workplace for quite a while. But the one-to-many-many-to-one capability offered by Twitter (and Yammer, and other platforms that already have Twitter clones as part of their feature repertoire) is tailor made for effective ongoing communications for project teams, value webs comprised of vendors, suppliers, clients, etc.)
We’ll see a lot more of it … the online version of popping your head around the cubicle or walking over to the next department to talk to someone for a quick update and running into other interesting people and information on the way. Happens all the time.
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Socialtext Adds Twitter-like “Signals” And a Desktop AIR App
Erick Schonfeld
March 3, 2009
In yet another sign that this will be the year of the activity stream, Socialtext is adding a Twitter-like message stream to its enterprise wiki/workspace service, The new feature is called Socialtext Signals, and it appears both as a widget in the Socialtext dashboard and as a standalone desktop app built on Adobe AIR.
Socialtext Signals is essentially an enterprise version of Twitter, much like Yammer. Employees within a company can micro-message each other without competitors or the rest of the world snooping. They will see only the messages of the co-workers they are following. In addition to the 140-character messaging between co-workers (the “signals”), there is also an “activity” tab. This generates a micro-message every time a person you are following takes an action inside Socialtext, such as creating a wiki page, writing a blog post, or making a comment.
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Glad to see that this feature is being considered as an important part of collaboration. We built status updates into our enterprise collaboration product from the start and in testing (we go commercial this week!) it’s been a hugely popular feature. Why is this? Users just seem to like to communicate activity across a business – and when the business is geographically disparate it provides that instant insight that would never be achieved by formal channels by the time it’s happened it’s almost too late. And we know that it’s this sort of insight which can kickstart project action and productivity. The ‘business’ likes it because it is ‘within the boundaries’, and when it’s a 10 second update there can be no claims that it’s a productivity-sapper. Perhaps it’s this type of tool that will make ’social’ acceptable in the enterprise. Quick, easy, effective.
I suspect you’re right, Dorothy.
People are people, and the more software and interconnectedness can ensure they ape existing or latent social impulses and behaviour, the more likely any given application will find users, utility and uptake.
[...] are using it as a tool to monitor, promote and support, and all the enterprise versions that it has influenced. There are even books, how-to’s, songs, video, plus breaking news, natural disasters, [...]
Jon – I agree and I think within the enterprise Twitter like features integrated with a platform works better than stand alone. See my post just before you for a reference to another example -Traction Software. Great to see you again in Vegas. Bill
Hi, Bill. Yes, great indeed to have some hang time with you and our other friends in LV a couple of weeks ago.
I did read your post .. I agree with you .. and as I think you know, there are a number of major collaboration platforms that are beginning to have some form of group IM / one to many many to one notification capabilities embedded in the layer where real-time or near-real-time collaboration activities take place.
I think (and I think you agree) that it is a very “natural” way to connect and exchange about issues when working online. I suspect, as noted above, that we will see a lot more of it in the next couple of years, and that “it” will be a part of all workplaces within 5 to 10 years. Kinda like memo technology (pens, pencils and post-it notes) 20 years ago, maybe ?
I have recently started to use Yammer in order to have a good communication on a new online business venture. How would you compare and contrast Yammer with Socialtext?
Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: “What are you working on?”.
Socialtext is a full-blown collaboration plaform … Socialtext Workspace is the core collaboration platform, with unlimited wiki workspaces, personal dashboards for users, and weblogs for ongoing collaborative conversations. Additional features / functionality includes Socialtext People for social networking, and Socialtext Signals for microblogging-based information sharing. It also plugs into the major Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Connections platforms.
Jon Husband,
Thanks for the information.
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