Social Collaboration Platform - Anyone?


The most interesting thing about Gartner's "Magic Quadrant for Team Collaboration and Social Software, 2007" is that there are no leaders. This is an open opportunity that represents one of the great promises of the Web - applying technology for better and more efficient interaction.

This report is about corporate solutions and their efforts to have better Customer Service, Market Research, and Product Innovation. Meanwhile, the consumer is currently "twitter"ing with the latest apps with better tools. As these startups struggle with a sustainable business model they should do an Enterprise project in addition to their way cool live flirting podcast game!

There are only two visionaries (just barely) Socialtext and SuiteTwo. Of course MS (including Ray Ozzie's Groove) and IBM pull ahead by putting money and manpower (but not the best stuff) into their solutions.

Another company that looks to have some strong momentum is Waltham based Awareness Networks . Other players in the Boston region are: Communispace, Prospero, and Mzinga.

MIA! - Where is our Social Network darling (your welcome Marc) Ning? Another company that is not listed here is KickApps (an investor is Boston's Spark Capital). They have a good vision for developers that is worth watching. Also keep your eye on my favorite mobile podcasting tool, Utterz, that should be heading towards a collaboration and knowledge sharing service (if I get to say anything about it - which I am).

It is time to dream about the perfect solution for your collaborations with family, friends, employees, partners, customers, etc... because it is almost here.

Here is a note from Socialtext, "Socialtext, MindTouch and Twiki, for instance, are primarily enterprise-class wikis and all have an open source option. Jive Software and Leverage Software add more of a social networking dimension with user profiles, allowing people to locate people with some specific expertise. Social Platform includes ecommerce capabilities, auctions and classifieds as part of its solution. Six Apart’s MovableType Enterprise Solution focuses on blogs and Telligent’s Community Server supports blogs and forums. Traction Teampage combines blogs and wikis, as do some of the other players. SiteScape goes the more traditional route with instant messaging, chat, SMS , email and conferencing. voice-and web-conferencing, and also has forums, blogs and wikis."

Go here to see Dion at ZDNet give a good overview of "Enterprise 2.0"