SocialText 3.0 is (or will be in the near term) an enterprise mashup of Facebook, FriendFeed, enterprise microblogging, and the wiki. If you were to take any one of these constituencies – social networking, conversation aggregation, Tw*tter, or vanilla wikis and the leveraged sites the technology has produced – you might not think of SocialText as a major player or competitor with the exception of the enterprise wiki space. But add these together and get out ahead of both the market and the logical expansion plans of larger players, and SocialText 3.0 may have something hard to disrupt.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen enterprise Twitter clones appearing from many companies both big and small. The central conceit of these apps is integration with business processes inside the corporate firewall. In most cases, the services leverage the Twitter use case: semi-public SMS-length comments with very little conversational threading but live search capabilities called track that allow group collaboration to be aggregated. Layered on top of the message data is a taxonomy derived from each user’s Follow cloud of colleagues, data feeds, and competitive analysis.
It’s not yet clear whether microblogging can make the leap from consumer to enterprise utility. Tw*tter’s dominant market share has so far kept open source projects such as Laconica at bay, and Facebook’s 100 million users keep it well out of reach of even large platform attacks from Microsoft and Google. Though Facebook seems to be emulating some FriendFeed conversational patterns, it’s unlikely a firewalled business intelligence or customer relationship management service will emerge from either dominant or elite clouds.
SocialText 3.0 harvests assets of all three networks, adding SocialText People and Dashboard to the core Workspace product, with an early private beta of Tw*tter clone Signals. People’s profiles and user directory let employees inside the firewall and across extranets describe themselves and subscribe to each others’ activity streams. Dashboard gives IT tools to define and centrally distribute workgroup and executive frameworks that, like a wiki, can be changed by users. The update stream is automatically posted to the dashboard with edits to wiki pages, blog posts, modifications to profiles, and other OpenSocial-compatible widgets.
This implicit stream of data can be augmented via the REST API and the ATOM Publishing Protocol to create new update types in the form of a “MadLib” syntax: [Bob] [edited] this [page] in this [workspace] or [Jane] [closed] this [Salesforce lead] successfully, and so on. Gadgets can be dragged and dropped onto the Dashboard to let users pay attention across multiple workspaces, enterprise systems, and Web services.
The forthcoming Signals API will support the Twitter API, making it easy for IT to leverage the broad pool of third party micromessaging clients such as Twhirl and compatible tools from loosely federated Laconica-compatible servers. Social Signals goes beyond the current Twitter architecture with channels, essentially groups that can be managed via workspace creation and deployment. Signals will extend Workspaces support for email notification and content posting, which already turns the subject line into the title of the page, the body into the content, and the page into a watchlist.
With Signals, additional email functionality will send notifications of a given signal, and provide an email address to post directly to your stream and on to followers. The Signals API will let IT create signal types to pull in Twitter posts and convert them to signals, or optionally take signals and post them to Twitter. Given the sensitivity of corporate data, it’s thought that exporting corporate data to the wild west of the public network will not have a lot of uptake.
On first glance, this combination of implicit lifecasting and activity streams and explicit contextual business intelligence seems a natural but vulnerable addition to corporate information systems. But as with the proliferation of “consumer” technologies including the iPhone and social graph data in prfessional networks such as LinkedIn, the innate training of a user population in micromessaging fundamentals suggests the underlying techniques will prove popular as companies merge and are acquired in challenging economic times.
SocialText 3.0 has the feel of a technology that emerged in the open source, community-driven culture, yet is now well-positioned for adoption by small and medium-sized businesses that more and more are linking together across corporate domains and between workers, partners, and customers. The strategy enhances SocialText’s positioning as a loosely coupled platform significantly more malleable and distributed than standalone products, with a substantial buffer from larger players who don’t have the incentive to move aggressively or as quickly as a small company can.
Checking this out right away!
Very cool. Aggregation platforms like this are another step forward toward the “MetaMee” concept: http://tinyurl.com/5jnh5h
Any chance of re-writing this in English?
Two tips – remove all the run-on sentences and take out all the IT nerd jargon.
Thanks Steve. Excellent coverage!
I believe this is exactly where many small publishers need to be
headed.
If produced and managed well, one can have a significant,
findable, coherent presence online with that blueprint.
I think it correlates exactly with Fred Wilson’s take on
Web presence:
“Honestly I am not envisioning anything other than this; every single human being posting their thoughts and experiences in any number of ways to the Internet.”
http://www.avc....sion-for-s.html
Excellent coverage, and I agree, socially-oriented platforms could well transform the way that we do business. After all, we are already using them and gaining great value from Twitter, Facebook etc in our personal lives.
And as the financial meltdown continues, businesses are going to start looking at innovative new ways to reach, harness and build upon the networks that are already in place. Done well, a SocialText 3.0 setup could deliver some serious advantages to small and medium businesses wanting to acquire new customers and add value to the existing customer base.
Steve,
Have you compared this to what Jive is doing with Clearspace? That screenshot looks a *lot* like what Clearspace looked like a while back, and Clearspace has only evolved more so since. In terms of “Facebook for the enterprise”, I don’t think it would be accurate to say that SocialText was the first mover.
Jive is Sequoia-backed, but not well known in the bay (they are a Portland, OR company). I think they were covered once on TechCrunch back in April, but that’s it. Would love to hear what you think of ClearSpace 2.5.
Patrick
PS: For full disclosure – I did a short stint @ Jive 3 years ago.
Seems very interesting…yet when I signed up for the 14 free trial…it doesn’t look anything like socialtext 3.0 seen above in the screen-shots. Any body know how to trial socialtext 3.0?
Hmm – one of our clients is heading in this direction. Very interesting.
Hi Ed, we had a small hiccup this morning. Your trial has been upgraded and all new trials will immediately experience Socialtext 3.0
I have a video of Ross demonstrating the new features to me last night: http://scobleiz...itter-to-wikis/
Found this video this morning shot several weeks ago where Ross Mayfield presents SocialText 3.0
Interesting!
http://www.atel...o-the-workplace
cool! going to go try it out.
Yaawwwnn…
The mimicry is flattering, but the missing component is very clearly a coupling of the social services integration with legacy and enterprise systems. MindTouch has been providing this since 2007. Not only can you do all this social fun stuff with MindTouch, but you can also (easily) connect your enterprise systems and databases and mashup the data and services as you see fit. Yes, even non-technical, end users can mashup the disparate services, applications and data silos.
Finally, MindTouch Deki, a compiled code enterprise collaboration platform, has a massive open source community footprint that yields thousands of downloads a day and countless community contributions; whereas, Socialtext’s, a Perl based wiki application, is driving only a few downloads a day.
See MindTouch Deki in action here: http://developer.mozilla.org or learn more about enterprise deployments here: http://www.mindtouch.com
Like I said: Yaawnnn…. although, it is funny to watch the anti-reality field.
I checked out MindTouch, it’s pretty cool!
I think microblogging should be the “glue” or “mortar” between the many collaborative web apps that enterprise is already using. It seemed you were hinting that MindTouch will do this, but I didn’t see that feature.
btw the anti-reality field you refer to must be powered by everyone’s collective disgust with current corporate intranet solutions. Web 2.0 juice needs to spill into enterprise systems.
I’m not trying to sound snarky, but your comment might sound a little less pompous if I could actually access MindTouch’s web page at http://www.mind....com…just saying.
I’m actually looking for something like SocialText so if MindTouch is a superior product I would definitely be interested in demo’ing the app.
Seems different from just a blending of facebook and twitter elements. There is some more coverage at this article.
talk about trying to be everything at once. you have a facebook, twitter clone all in one. when will we see twitter + facebook+ socialtext clone all in one.
signed ,
learn to innovate
Might have to try this now for my nonprofits:-)
I’m intrigured by the fact that another company (based out of Iowa), CustomerVision.com has been doing this sort of thing for years and they’ve never gotten any coverage on TechCrunch. Is TC transfixed with the “cool” rather than substance?
@Alamgir Kahn I concur. CustomerVision has been an unrecognized leader for some time.
http://www.wibokr.com may be next one like this….
YAWN
Steve Gillmor’s writing, as per usual, embodies everything that’s wrong with tech “journalism”. So much so he appears to have made quite an art form out of it. You can almost hear the less discerning readers salivating like Pavlovian dogs as each buzzword is clumsily dropped into each long, tedious sentence.
This may as well be Scientology, or the Masons, or any other silly, meaningless group where people can pretend what they say has meaning, and others can pretend they get it.
Sadly, when such delusion becomes a part of one’s identity, it is very, very rare for someone to acknowledge and abandon it, and so it goes, we get paragraphs so outrageously bizarre, you wonder when someone’s going to leap out and say “Ha! Gotcha!”.
“On first glance, this combination of implicit lifecasting and activity streams and explicit contextual business intelligence seems a natural but vulnerable addition to corporate information systems. But as with the proliferation of “consumer” technologies including the iPhone and social graph data in prfessional networks such as LinkedIn, the innate training of a user population in micromessaging fundamentals suggests the underlying techniques will prove popular as companies merge and are acquired in challenging economic times.”
Indeed, Steve. Indeed.
Sometimes I think it’s getting a little silly now with the amount of social networking sites out there
hai
I like this a lot.
It seems to me that Social Text can be one of the few companies in this industry that can make any progress with this. Social Networking within the workplace could make a big difference.
There are so many social media networks out there today it is impossible to keep up with all of them. It amazes me how these new networks still create such a buzz around the world even with so many out there.