Tom Raftery’s Social Media

Things move fast in the Web 2.0 world! Only a couple of weeks back I wrote a review of Enterprise Wiki software in which I mentioned PBWiki and Socialtext amongst others.

I like Socialtext and would have recommended it had PBWiki not just shipped its new interface. The PBWiki interface is friendlier and easier to get around for non-techies so I went for that.

Now today I see two posts mentioning that a new version of SocialText is en route which will make SocialText a much more compelling enterprise app.

Socialtext is adding Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People. From Michael Arrington’s post:

SocialText Dashboard, pictured above, is a Netvibes-like customizable home page. Users can add SocialText widgets that show information from the company’s wiki - total edits, a list of workspaces, change summaries, etc. Other widgets are for productivity, like a calendar, or just for fun, like a YouTube widget.

All Dashboard widgets are Google Widget compatible, which means that, subject to security settings, they can also be added to sites like iGoogle. But more importantly, all iGoogle widgets can also be added to the Dashboard page. So you can, for example, pull Gmail directly into your SocialText Dashboard.

While in Socialtext People, users can create profiles and add “friends” within the organization. You can monitor the activity stream of mutual friends as well, which includes outside services such as Twitter. And as Rafe Needleman points out in his post:

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 to 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.

So, if you haven’t rushed out after my last post and dived into PBWiki, you might want to think again about SocialText. It just keeps getting better and better.