- Image by Tac Anderson via Flickr
We have dozens of Twitter-like, microblogging applications for inside the enterprise but where’s the LifeStreaming applications? If there is one already, I’m not aware of it.
Where is the Enterprise 2.0 version of FriendFeed? Where is the app that captures my work progress? Every time I create a document, edit a wiki, have a conference call or client meeting that activity should be captured in my work-LifeStream. All the pieces are there. In the enterprise Microsoft Office is the predominant OS and Vista and Office 07 have RSS built into the entire system (disclaimer: Microsoft is a client). There is no reason* that all of my work activity (probably excluding emails) couldn’t be captured in one activity stream. Details about the activity could be limited to little more than something like a document title and possibly a summary or snippet. (*By ‘no reason’ I do not mean to minimize the difficulty of building this type of app.)
Then all of those streams could be connected by work teams, projects and any other various ‘net-work’ connection.
IMO, project management would reach new levels of efficiency. I’m sure (I hope) there are several smart companies working on this (send me an email if you are). I also think that this type of activity would do more to break down company silo’s than anything else.
What do you think? Am I crazy? Would this type of activity overwhelm the average worker (initially yes). Is that a bad thing?
You may be wondering what the picture in this post has to do with the article. This is the office where 3 years ago Rich Breton and I tried to make a product similar to this idea. You can read about that effort here.
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I've been thinking about this, and I realized that companies would probably start to use the Twitter API or a clone of it on their intranets, because they could then benefit from the same kind of innovation explosion that created the Twitter “ecosystem”.
Twitter took off partly because it's API was ridonkulously easy to connect to. You can do it from any programming language, often in just one or two lines of code, with http authentication.
Twitter's API has been cloned in open source microblog packages like Laconica and (partially) in (my) OpenMicroBlogger. The missing piece is pulling RSS feeds into the stream and that's pretty trivial.
Posted by brianjesse | 19. May, 2009, 7:07 pmI think the Twitter API is one piece of it. What makes FriendFeed so compelling is the personal search capabilities. The ability to dump everything into one place where others can follow or anyone can go in and search for the most recent activity.
An E2.0 version of FriendFeed would actually make Intranets useful
Posted by tacanderson | 19. May, 2009, 8:10 pmTac, have you heard of Socialcast? It has likes, comments, and a live activity stream. (at least it claims to, I haven't seen it working) http://www.socialcast.com/
Posted by Meryn Stol | 19. May, 2009, 8:55 pmI've kicked the tires on a lot of E2.0 tools but not SocialCast. It sounds interesting, the only question I have is how well it integrates into existing work tools. That's been the bane of any enterprise tool; getting people to input the right content. Until tools can capture information as I work (like FriendFeed does) they won't ever reach their potential.
Posted by tacanderson | 19. May, 2009, 9:54 pmSocialcast definitely integrates into existing corporate tools. Users can email posts into their corporate social network, and receive replies via email as well. You can also integrate with IM, add a bookmarklet in your web browser (to share links), and for users on Gmail or Google Apps email, you can install a widget of activity inside your inbox.
Additionally, Socialcast allows you to integrate with tools like Twitter, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Vimeo, etc. When you're using these tools on the web, Socialcast pulls in your activity as you work.
Feel free to look at our demo at demo.socialcast.com. Thanks!
Posted by Carrie Young, Socialcast | 20. May, 2009, 1:59 amDoes this work inside the firewall or is this purely a hosted solution? From my experience there seems to be a lack of behind the firewall solutions and I don't think many large companies are ready to jump to the cloud yet.
Posted by bsloane | 20. May, 2009, 3:45 amThats an interesting idea! it would be a good way for someone to evaluate how much they get done in a day, and also for the manager to evaluate the same
Posted by Priyanka D | 20. May, 2009, 6:49 amThere's a chance that this solution is a hacked version of e-mail. Right now, I work in an agency with 7 different offices in the US. We're connected via phone (four digit dialing to any office), e-mail, and Microsoft messenger. We also have sharepoint, that has the build in blog, wiki, and pages for work groups, clients, etc (we're somewhat paperless).
If chat were built into mail (like Google and Yahoo have done), then we could, in theory, lose messenger, which already synchs with e-mail. Further, the updating of content on Sharepoint can be tracked into a lifestream of sorts that people could subscribe to.
Posted by mrhames | 20. May, 2009, 1:36 pmThis may be what you are looking for
http://www.cubetree.com/
Thanks,
@mrbipana
Posted by Michael Jones | 20. May, 2009, 9:55 pm