As a follow-up to its free, 50-user microblogging product, Socialtext is launching a new paid service for large to enterprise-sized companies that lets them run the Twitter-like service behind the firewall, and with many more users.
Companies that want it can pay $1 per user, per month, alongside a monthly fee that pays for Socialtext's server appliance. This hardware runs the microblogging software locally, and can be connected to a company's backup systems for if something goes wrong, although it makes nightly backups of its own. The appliance fee also covers monthly software updates that will fix bugs and add new features.
In a call with CNET News on Monday, Ross Mayfield who is Socialtext's chairman, president, and co-founder, said that the benefits of having a system like this locally can make a big difference when doing a fresh setup on a big company. "You turn it on, and in five minutes you can start posting right away."
Your company 'tweets' would go through this box.
(Credit: Socialtext)To speed things up, the appliance can be connected to local staff directories and pull in employee information to create user accounts that have profile information including phone numbers and e-mail address already filled out. Anytime local directory changes are made, this information gets updated in Socialtext too. Administrative control is also not limited to IT staff, since certain users can be graced with admin privileges of their own that let them moderate both user content and the users themselves.
Companies will still be able to use Socialtext's free 50-user version of the service that lives in the cloud, but this option gives larger companies a bigger user cap and more control over the data. Mayfield also pushed the fact that companies that wanted to tack on additional Socialtext services won't have to get any additional hardware since they'll already have it for this service.
Socialtext is undercutting competitors like Yammer in price, as well as offering an additional way to deliver its service. Yammer has its own Web based service for enterprise power users, however it's a little more pricey at $3-5 per user, per month (depending on what plan they go for). There is, however, no hardware to buy. On the flip side, Socialtext's solution can still be used even if access to the outside world is blocked, which can often be the best time to find out what your employees are up to.
The Free Music Archive, an organization created by WFMU, a "freeform" radio station, has officially launched into beta. So far, the site has 5,000 tracks that users can download for free. According to the site's founders, the Free Music Archive is aimed at becoming a repository of tracks, remixes, and music clips for personal consumption. Any of the songs can be added to podcasts, video shows, or a playlist. No licensing fees or royalties will be charged. The organization hopes that through free downloads, more people will buy an artist's full album. Along with a download link, each individual track page has a link to the artist's album page. That page makes the full album available for purchase. The Free Music Archive is live now.
Insurance company Geico has launched a new site to provide visitors with all the information they need about Geico-sponsored car racing teams. Dubbed GeicoGarage, the new site provides access to the company's NASCAR program. It features updated news and photos on all the teams, as well as bios, competition schedules, and downloads.
Enterprise collaboration service Socialtext recently announced that it has raised $4.5 million in a new round of financing that was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Omidyar Networks. The company's founder said in a blog post that he plans to use the funding to improve the product.
Social-banking firm SmartyPig announced Thursday that it has launched a new mobile site. The site will allow users to quickly access account information, as well as view the status of their financial goals. They can also track transaction history and transfer funds from their mobile device. The mobile site is optimized for the iPhone, but the company says that users on Android-based devices will be able to see the site just fine. The SmartyPig mobile site is live now.
A man who didn't want to be photographed for Google Street View turned the tables on the online giant and threatened to take a picture of the Street View vehicle and its driver unless it moved on, the Telegraph is reporting. It didn't, so he started snapping pictures. The driver in the Google vehicle became upset that the photographer was taking pictures of him and shouted to the man to stop taking pictures of him. He then asked for his face to be blurred. Individual faces are also blurred in Google StreetView images.
Enterprise social software company Socialtext is releasing Socialtext 3.0, with the features we previewed here in April: the corporate social network Socialtext People, and a revised home page for business users, Socialtext Dashboard.
These functions, plus a revised and streamlined user interface, will be embedded in the Socialtext suite, along with a new feature that records a running stream of who's doing what and where on the system, which users can subscribe to from their profile pages or their dashboards. It's almost, but not quite, Socialtext's own Twitter for enterprise customers. Missing is the capability for users to post free-form, Twitter-like items into the stream. That function is coming later, according to Ross Mayfield, chairman, president, and co-founder of Socialtext.
What's the hold-up? Mayfield showed me a prototype business nanoblog called Socialtext Signals, as if to prove that the company could make such an app. (It didn't take long, he admitted). But he said of the app, "We're going to throw it away"--the code, that is--and start over to build a more robust business nanoblog that offers what people in a workplace really need.
You can't have it yet.
Mayfield says that just giving users a Twitter clone doesn't solve the dual problems of information overload on the one hand, and personal isolation at work on the other. He believes that the most important communication between workers in a company is what they are doing. "When I work," Mayfield says, "I'm sharing knowledge as a byproduct of getting work done. In the enterprise, what someone does is more important than what they say."
So the new Socialtext will let users subscribe to wiki pages and to the activity stream of other users, to see when files are edited, and when tasks are accepting and finishing. The product also displays comments left on wiki pages. But the feature that lets users ask free-form questions to their workgroup is missing.
Mayfield told me Socialtext will eventually release a standalone, desktop version of Signals that lets users "Twitter" to their co-workers. A private beta of the app is entering testing now.
I'm not sure Socialtext's delay is due to a lag in development or if it's strategic. I suspect the latter. Mayfield, who speaks in somewhat Delphic riddles regarding the nature of work, says, "The updates box (in Socialtext Signals) is less about trying to have conversations. It's about surfacing conversations that people are having in workspaces."
I'm glad to see a contemporary groupware company like Socialtext taking the longer view of the Twitter concept than upstarts like Yammer and Present.ly. In this space, I've been a fan of Socialcast more than those apps, because it's based on the larger vision of integrating information from numerous group applications. That's what Socialtext is doing, too, and it's the right thing for business. "The end state for this kind of application is a connected collaboration platform, not standalone microblogging, which is relatively shallow," Mayfield said. But I still believe that the company should hustle up and get its Twitter-alike product into the hands of its customers. Not everyone appreciates the long view.
Socialtext 3.0 gets a social network and a quasi-Twitter function.
(Credit: Socialtext)
Related Webware reviews:
Yammer: A 'Twitter for the enterprise'
Present.ly is smarter than Yammer
Socialcast is FriendFeed for your business
SocialCalc is coming to the enterprise wiki, SocialText.
(Credit: SocialText)Corporate Wiki software company SocialText is adding a spreadsheet to its wiki product. The new feature, SocialCalc, allows users to collaborate on spreadsheets the same way they do in the company's text-based Wikis. The product is based on Dan Bricklin's open-source Wikicalc.
For spreadsheet jockeys this is both good and bad news. On the positive side, SocialCalc spreadsheets inherit wiki-style revision tracking, which is an automatic audit trail that will arguably be even more important on spreadsheets with financial and other hard data on them than it is on text-based wiki pages. "There's no inherent audit trail in Excel," SocialText chairman Ross Mayfield reminded me.
Users can also easily embed data from other SocialCalc sheets in their spreadsheets, or for that matter data from any SocialText wiki page or Web URL. This could make building workgroup-wide, or even company-wide spreadsheets possible. Assuming, that is, everyone in said workgroup or company is comfortable using SocialCalc instead of Excel.
Which brings us to the negatives of this new product. The biggest is that it is not Excel, and it will require the most re-learning from exactly those people who would find its collaboration functions the most helpful: heavy spreadsheet users. And it's not just the interface that's different, it's the features. Like many Web-based productivity tools, SocialCalc doesn't have all the analytic or presentation features of its mature standalone counterparts. I predict this will frustrate people who want to use SocialCalc to build complex company-wide models on it.
Mayfield told me that coordinating work is "at least eight times as important" as providing a complete Excel-caliber feature set on SocialCalc, and I agree in principle, but I can still see a few heavy Excel users in a company raising a very loud stink if they are forced to use a tool that doesn't do everything they are accustomed to.
The other downside to SocialCalc is that it doesn't allow real-time collaboration like the spreadsheet in Google Docs does. While some people see live multi-person spreadsheet editing as a gimmick, in fact the more people who need to contribute to a worksheet the more important that feature becomes. It removes the awkward need for users to wait in line to edit a document if someone else has it open.
SocialText will provide professional services to make the adoption easier by its customers, and the tool will no doubt be welcomed by infrequent spreadsheet users. It's a good addition to the SocialText lineup; I just don't expect it to be an easy transition for everyone.
If you love a good theory--of psychology, physics, economics, you name it--go work at SocialText. These guys live in their heads. That became apparent when I talked to founder Ross Mayfield and newish CEO Eugene Lee this week about the updates they're making to the company's enterprise wiki product. I learned that if you want to sell to enterprise IT bigwigs, you need to talk a good talk. You need to, "reduce the latency of getting information transmitted."
A Socialtext people page (click to enlarge).
Which, I think, means: Talk fast.
And it helps to have some contemporary features in the products your vintage 2002 company makes. So interspersed with the theory, I got the rundown on the updates to Socialtext that will be shipping within 90 days. The most important change is the addition of a "people" datatype in Socialtext, which makes it into a passable enterprise social network. Socialtext is also rolling out a Netvibes-like dashboard that makes the wiki a lot more approachable.
I like the way Socialtext is handling the people pages. Rather than asking users to fill out a long list of form items, it's tag-based. You can tag yourself "M&A" if you're in business development. Others can tag you, too. Then, if you're looking for someone with a particular skill or hobby, you just search on tags. Tags are easier to update, and because of that you're more likely to see good information in individuals' tag clouds, compared with a bunch of form fields that no one wants to bother with. Of course, tag clouds and folksonomies are also less rigorous than straight data fields, but you know what they say: They make it up in volume.
The new Netvibes-like Dashboard (click to enlarge).
Once you find the person you're looking for in the new people pages, you can follow them and get updated whenever they change your company wiki. It's like an enterprise Twitter. It's potentially very useful, if also possibly creepy.
Every Socialtext user now also gets his or her own personal Dashboard, where they can track pages and people they're interested in, watch stats on their wiki, or see info from other sources, like blogs, or OpenSocial widgets.
These changes, Mayfield admits, "are not all that new from the consumer perspective," but they do make the wiki platform a more comfortable place to work for people who likely spend their personal online time in apps like Facebook.
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