Twitter and Facebook provide a plethora of efficient collaboration and messaging capabilities, but businesses have been hesitant to officially use these services in-house for security and control issues. Socialcast, Socialtext and Huddle are three services designed to offer the features of Twitter, Facebook and other Web 2.0 technologies in a way that is palatable to the enterprise.
The first time business users look at Twitter, they have to be intrigued. It’s a great way to determine the status of employees--where they’re traveling, what they’re working on, and even what they are reading or discussing. And it’s a great tool for sending out questions to the entire organization or going over new ideas. But few organizations would want to do this on a public network such as Twitter.
The solution is to implement an access-controlled Twitter-like service for business use. This is pretty much the idea behind Socialcast. To get started with Socialcast go to www.socialcast.com and start up a company account (free for up to 10 users, and $1 per month for each additional user with special pricing for large companies).
With the signup, Socialcast provides a unique organization URL in the form of organization.socialcast.com. When you first log into Socialcast, it definitely seemed similar to Twitter, though with a nicer look and some key differences. For example, instead of asking “What are you doing?” Socialcast asks “What’s on your mind?” Messages can be entered from the main Socialcast screen or sent through e-mail to the service.
Socialcast also has some nice tools to categorize and tag messages. For example, putting #idea in a message will classify it as an idea. This also works with any tag you want to use simply by putting # in front of a word. So it would be possible to classify all fundraising discussions by adding #fundraising to these messages.
Messages can have any file type attached to them (with images appearing in the message), and can also be put into company-configurable categories. Like Twitter, employees can choose to follow other employees on Socialcast and stay up-to-date on all of their messages. Users can reply to other messages both publicly and privately.
As an administrator, users can carry out some simple customization and configuration within Socialcast to change the look of pages and add organization logos. Socialcast also provides an analytics screen that tracks usage of the system and offers a quick visual glance at the type of discussions occurring.
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