Curated for content, computing, and digital experience professionals

Day: March 4, 2010

Filtering Microblogging and Activity Streams

The use of microblogging and activity streams is maturing in the enterprise. This was demonstrated by recent announcements of enhancements to those components in two well-regarded enterprise social software suites.

On February 18th, NewsGator announced a point release to its flagship Enterprise 2.0 offering, Social Sites 3.1. According to NewsGator, this release introduces the ability for individuals using Social Sites to direct specific microblogging posts and status updates to individuals, groups, and communities. Previously, all such messages were distributed to all followers of the individual poster and to the general activity stream of the organization. Social Sites 3.1 also introduced the ability for individuals to filter their activity streams using “standard and custom filters”.

Yesterday (March 3rd), Socialtext announced a major new version of its enterprise social software suite, Socialtext 4.0. Both the microblogging component of Socialtext’s suite and its stand-along microblogging appliance now allow individuals to broadcast short messages to one or more groups (as well as to the entire organization and self-selected followers.) Socialtext 4.0 also let individuals filter their incoming activity stream to see posts from groups to which they belong (in addition to filtering the flow with the people and event filters that were present in earlier versions of the offering.)

The incorporation of these filters for outbound and incoming micro-messages are an important addition to the offerings of NewsGator and Socialtext, but they are long overdue. Socialcast has offered similar functionality for nearly two years and Yammer has included these capabilities for some time as well (and extended them to community members outside of an organization’s firewall, as announced on February 25th.) Of course, both Socialcast and Yammer will need to rapidly add additional filters and features to stay one step ahead of NewsGator and Socialtext, but that represents normal market dynamics and is not the real issue. The important question is this:

What other filters do individuals within organizations need to better direct microblogging posts and status updates to others, and to mine their activity streams?

I can easily imagine use cases for location, time/date, and job title/role filters. What other filters would be useful to you in either targeting the dissemination of a micro-message or winnowing a rushing activity stream?

One other important question that arises as the number of potential micro-messaging filters increases is what should be the default setting for views of outgoing and incoming messages? Should short bits of information be sent to everyone and activity streams show all organizational activity by default, so as to increase ambient awareness? Perhaps a job title/role filter should be the default, in order to maximize the focus and productivity of individuals?

There is no single answer other than “it depends”, because each organization is different. What matters is that the decision is taken (and not overlooked) with specific corporate objectives in mind and that individuals are given the means to easily and intuitively change the default target of their social communications and the pre-set lens through which they view those of others.

Alfresco Announces Beta of Cloud ECM for SMB

Alfresco Software announced a Beta program for Alfresco SMB Edition, a cloud-based appliance designed for Amazon EC2. This new version of Alfresco Software’s ECM and social collaboration product is designed for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). The Alfresco SMB Edition will offer a pre-configured Alfresco Cloud appliance that combines the Alfresco server, Explorer and Share modules into an on-demand offering aimed at SMBs with up to 100 users and 200GB of document storage. These appliances are hosted on Amazon EC2 and made available as paid Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Alfresco has partnered with JumpBox, who specialize in building software appliances, to develop Alfresco SMB. Initially the beta will be restricted to US based subscribers with EU access to follow within two weeks. The program includes access to the Alfresco SMB paid AMI, although testers are expected to pay all relevant Amazon EC2 hosting fees. The Beta program will run from March 15 through May 20, 2010. http://www.alfresco.com

Atex Acquires Kaango

Kaango, a web classified advertisement software platform, has joined the Atex global family of companies. As part of a deal that keeps Hearst Corporation and MediaNews Group as shareholders. Atex plans to expand Kaango worldwide. Kaango, which launched in 2006, provides a Web-based software platform to syndicate and publish print and online classified ads. A key feature of Kaango websites is they do not send users clicking away to unknown sites to view and interact with ads. This allows Kaango’s media partners to provide large ad volumes and a consistent user experience within each marketplace. Kaango also supports social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook as well as cross-posting to multiple Twitter accounts to support individual publishers. Atex will offer the Kaango service and brand to non-Atex sites as well as Atex’s current client base, as well as integrating Kaango technology within Atex’s advertising and Web content management systems. http://www.atex.com/ http://www.kaango.com/

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