Email and calendars. Email is, unsurprisingly,  still the most important mobile app. According to Forrester, 87 percent of smartphone workers use email on their devices (which leaves me wondering what other 13 percent use their smartphones for), and collectively, they do 32 percent of their email on a smartphone. While most smartphones come with their own email and calendaring tools most users will use, there are some third-party options worth considering:

• Gmail and Google Calendar. If you use Gmail, it’s worth noting that the mobile-optimized versions of the Gmail and Google Calendar sites are pretty good. They are fast and have a great UI, and one of the advantages of using them is that you can seamlessly switch from device to device without having to set up IMAP details in your various devices’ email clients.
• Touchdown. Brings superb Microsoft Exchange support to Android devices.

Document-based collaboration. Mobile workers need to be able to access their documents while out of the office on any of their devices. Cloud-based document collaboration tools need to include mobile access to be truly effective.

• Documents to Go. Dataviz’s Documents to Go is a popular mobile document editing app. It’s available for a variety of platforms, including iOS, BlackBerry, Android and Palm. When combined with a cloud file sync service like Dropbox or box.net, it enables users to access and edit their documents no matter where they are.
• Soonr. Soonr is a cloud-based document sync service. However, it also offers integrated MS Office document editing capabilities , which means users don’t need to use a separate app like Documents to Go.

Web conferencing. According to Forrester, 18 percent of information workers and 34 percent of senior staff use web conferencing at least weekly. Mobile access means being able to attend meetings even while away from the laptop.

• Fuze Meeting. Fuze Meeting’s impressive service is accessible with mobile devices. Its new Telepresence Connect service can extend traditional room-based telepresence to iPads and Android tablets.
• Join.me. LogMeIn’s simple and easy-to-use web conferencing app is accessible through iOS and Android apps.

Activity streams. Forrester thinks activity streams are becoming a critical resource for organizations that work collectively: sales teams, project teams, and executive staff, for example. Mobile support is crucial as it enables workers to stay updated no matter where they are.

• Yammer. Yammer is a popular enterprise social networking tool very much like a private Facebook for the enterprise. It offers mobile support though mobile apps available for a variety of platforms.
• Socialtext. Socialtext is another enterprise social networking and collaboration app that offers activity streams. It offers mobile support via an optimized version of the website.

Presence and chat. Knowing whether a colleague is available or not is a killer feature when out of the office. While this category of app lags today, Forrester expects adoption to accelerate. These types of features are often also often included in other mobile collaboration tools.

• eBuddy. A multi-protocol mobile chat app that supports AIM , ICQ, Google Talk, Yahoo! and MSN Windows Live Messenger within a single interface. It’s available via a native client for Android and iPhone and there’s also a mobile-optimized website.
• IM+. Another popular “all-on one” IM app that supports a variety of protocols, including AIM, iChat, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo, ICQ, Jabber, Google Talk, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and Skype Chat, and works on a number of different mobile platforms.

Social collaboration. In this category, Forrester includes access to internal blogs, wikis, community sites, and social networks from a tablet or smartphone. Mobile access allows every professional will remain connected and part of the collaborative process.

• IBM Lotus Connections. IBM’s social suite is supported on a range of mobile platforms, including Android, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry and Nokia.
• Jive Software. Jive Software’s enterprise social suite provides mobile  access though apps for iPhone and BlackBerry.

Expertise location. Forrester says this type of application is on the rise as firms look for ways to make mobile employees productive by helping them identify experts from anywhere. This type of app brings together presence, notifications, social profiles and data from HR. Many social business tools provide this kind of functionality, including:

• IBM Lotus Connections
• Jive Software
• Yammer
• Socialtext

Video conferencing. Skype has some 170 million active monthly users, and 39 percent of those people use Skype for work. Web conferencing vendors are also adding video to their products. Due to heavy resource requirements, there are few multi-party mobile video conferencing apps, though.

• Skype. Skype provides video calling for mobile platforms including iPhone and Android.
• Fring. One of the first apps to bring four-way video calls to the iPad, Fring provides native mobile apps for a variety of platforms, and also has mobile browser access.

Personally, I’m not convinced expertise location is really a “must-have” category of mobile collaboration app just yet. Do you agree with Forrester’s categories of “must-have” apps, and which apps do you recommend for each category?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Yagan Kiely

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• The Future of Workplaces

Unlike apps like Yammer and Socialtext, which are trying to be more general social tools for the enterprise, WorkSimple concentrates specifically on the sharing of goals. Users can comment on shared goals and “follow” the people, teams and categories they are interested in, in order to get visibility of goals (and their progress) across an organization. While the app can be used for collaboration — by uploading file attachments to goals, and commenting on shared goals, for example — WorkSimple isn’t really designed to be used as a general communications tool.

As well as individuals sharing their own goals, users can also assign goals to individuals and teams. Reporting features allow users to track goal progress. The tool allows managers to provide continuous feedback through comments, goal tracking and goal reviews.

WorkSimple shares some features with many collaborative task and project management apps, such as Basecamp and Producteev, but it’s better suited to sharing and managing broader goals, rather than more granular, individual tasks. As its name implies, it’s also simpler and easier to use than many task management apps, which should make it easier to deploy across an entire organization. That ease of use is a necessary asset, because the whole idea behind the app is to create a transparent environment where everyone is provided with real-time visibility into what people are working on, what work needs to get done and how things are going — if only a few people use it, it won’t be anywhere near as effective.

I can see WorkSimple being particularly beneficial in larger organizations and those using distributed teams, where visibility of goal setting and progress across an organization can be a big issue. However, its lack of integration with other task management, collaboration and social business tools may prove to be a stumbling block for many organizations. Additionally, businesses with existing task management or social business tools in place may find it somewhat redundant.

The basic social goals features in WorkSimple are free. Advanced features, such as the reporting tools, require a paid Company ($5 per month, or less with volume discounts) or Manager ($5 per month) account.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Here’s a look at the home page, which can look very different from one organization to another:

Note the familiar “activity stream” on the left, which you’ll find in all of the other enterprise social networking solutions. Podio allows you to add apps from the app store to workspace areas  called “Spaces.”  You can create as many Spaces as you need for your private network, or to share with external users such as clients or partners. The App Store makes it easy to set up specific tools for each of your Spaces. Podio also includes useful core tools such as a calendar, contacts area and a task management system like that you would find in solutions like Basecamp. These are all good features to include for a social platform in the workplace. Finally, having the ability to add other tools from the App Store gives each company a great deal of options.

Podio on the Go

There’s a free iPhone app for your Podio network, but I wasn’t as impressed with the it as I was with the Podio website. Currently, the iPhone app only provides access to a few core features such as the main activity stream, messaging, contacts, tasks and profiles; you don’t have access to any of the apps added to your Spaces from the App Store. I think it would make sense to include a way to include apps that you want your workforce to use while on the road on their mobile device.

Comparisons

So how does Podio compare to the current crop of corporate social platforms? Well, some have begun to give more options to add more features and customization, but none of them offer Podio’s range of specialty apps; I think its closest competitor could be a newly launched service called Convofy, which Simon reviewed recently.

Podio offers a free version for up to 10 users and a premium edition for $99/month for up to 25 users, and $4/month per additional user.

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Socialtext wants its product to replace legacy intranet systems. That’s why Socialtext 4.6 includes integration with business IM tools Lotus Sametime and Microsoft Office Communicator, to add to existing support for consumer-focused messaging apps like AIM, Yahoo Messenger and Skype). As shown in the graphic above, users can see presence indicators within the app and click to start Sametime chats.

Another new feature that makes the product more suitable for use on business intranets is the ability for employees to use widgets to build a personalized dashboard. Users can now embed widgets, such as a shared calendar or photo gallery, anywhere on the Socialtext platform, with no coding required. They can also use the widgets to access enterprise tools, such as CRM or ERP systems. Additionally, to assist businesses get a deeper insight into how their employees are using their intranets, Socialtext now also integrates with Google Analytics.

This release also includes notifications for Socialtext Signals (the product’s Twitter-like microblogging tool). The  new notification technology allows users to stay up-to-date with Signals messages no matter what application they’re using. The new notifications work natively in Chrome and can be enabled via an extension in Firefox.

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A new report at GigaOM Pro (subscription required) covers this landscape of new tools, looking at a selection of the leading companies in various sectors, examining each offering’s strength and weaknesses. However, I was particularly interested to read what author Haydn Shaughnessy thought made for sustainable (as opposed to functional) differentiators in the various providers of collaborative tools; looking more deeply at the value each vendor brings, rather than just the number of features its tools now provide. As you can see in the table below, many of the tools have very similar feature sets.

There are several potential sustainable differentiators that could each make for a strong product, including:

• Experience: Companies with more experience of the way tools are used in the workplace should have an edge over those that don’t. For example, companies with histories of working with user-driven communities, like Jive, will likely have an edge when implementing community features in its more recent apps. Of course, newer, inexperienced vendors could always acquire talent with the required experience, but in general, companies with long track records in a particular field will have more combined experience than those that don’t.
• Driving new concepts in collaborative work: Certain vendors, like Socialtext, are known to drive innovative thinking around new work practices, such as the use of “streams” to provide visibility in knowledge work. Companies at the forefront of those kind of innovations are likely to add ore value to their products.
• Ease of implementation: Some vendors offer tools, such as the “enterprise-lite,” consumer-like offerings from the likes of box.net and Yammer, that are easy to deploy and implement. They don’t require potential clients to go through a protracted enterprise decision-making process, and so are much less risky than complex, more expensive alternatives.
• Deep system integration: Some vendors have made integration with existing enterprise tools, like SharePoint a specialty. Certainly, if your business already has established enterprise tools in place, one of your priorities should be to look to vendors whose tools are designed to deeply mesh with those tools and improve upon them — not just superficially interface with them.
• Work process innovation: If discovering better work process is a priority, then Shaughnessy argues that businesses should choose a tool that’s already used by employees (presumably as this means that the concentrating on how the tool woks will be less of a priority for users), or one with strong ideation features, like brainstorming and discussion tools. I agree with this to an extent: Complex tools that force users into certain ways of working are much less likely to be used to discover new work processes; if you allow users to pick their own tools, they’ll implement their own ways of getting things done. The flipside, of course, is losing some control and oversight of employees.
• Stronger management oversight: While collaboration tools have the potential to make organizations flatter, we’ll still need some management oversight, and those managers will  need additional support if they’re working with remote teams. Certain vendors provide platforms with more advanced management tools that go beyond milestone setting or status updates.

Of course, certain companies would likely prioritize one or more of these differentiators depending on their needs, and when choosing software, there are many other factors to consider in addition to those listed above. But by looking deeper than the list of a product’s features, it’s possible to assess whether a company really brings an understanding of how its products could benefit the workplace and improve work processes,  and, ultimately, whether they will be successful.

Read a more in-depth analysis of these new work tools in the full report at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

Photo courtesy Flickr user prettydreamer.workshop

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In my previous post, I examined the specific needs our team: communications, management, archiving and interaction. Then I identified the processes that fall under each of those needs. Here’s an updated diagram illustrating this:

Also in my previous post, I identified the software solutions — all cloud-based — that my company was testing out or using to fulfill these needs. Here’s how I illustrated the disparate applications that we cobbled together to try to create the illusion of a seamless solution.

One of the main things this diagram shows is that there we were using many applications in an attempt attempt to mimic the experience of working in a single physical location. Our virtual team has the fundamental need to keep everything in the cloud, because we don’t have the ability to pop our head into the cubicle next to us to ask a question, or walk down the hall to access a shared filing cabinet to retrieve important documents, or gather by the water cooler to get to know one another better.

But how do you pare down these multiple online solutions to be able to use fewer applications and yet get more functionality? We’re finding that, over time, developers are contemplating these same needs and processes and coming up with more integrated solutions. For example, in just nine months since I wrote my last post about virtual teams, a new cloud-based workspace solution called Glasscubes has come onto the scene that seems to take a different approach to distributed work and project management.

Glasscubes starts with the premise that virtual teams need a “space” in which to work and that all of the functionality should then reside within each space. In most cases, cloud- based apps seem to come from the standpoint of their specific function — such as “project management” or “task management” or “time tracking” — and then work to solve that problem. In the cases of some services — such as 5pm – the app’s “environment” derives from its functions.

But when you fundamentally begin with the “environment” — such as with Glasscubes — it appears to me that you end up with a solution that is better at fulfilling our need for a “place” or “space” for working in the cloud. Because of the more integrated feature set in Glasscubes, much of what we’ve been using prior to it is quickly becoming redundant. Here’s a diagram that shows the changes in our process distribution, thanks to Glasscubes’ more complete virtual workspace solution.

As you can see, we’re still having to use other solutions, because even Glasscubes doesn’t cover all of our processes. However, now many even seemingly disparate needs are fulfilled with a single solution.

The Adoption Quandry

As our team grows, we continue to struggle with the problem of adopting new software solutions that each team member can embrace. Because of our different personalities, we’re each comfortable with some, but not all, of the different solutions we’ve been testing out to improve work processes. That’s why, for example, we’ve never adopted SugarSync for file syncing, sharing and archiving for example even though, in theory, it could be an amazing and seamless solution for us. It’s also why never did adopt Socialtext, even though I personally can see the tremendous functionality of that product to integrated distributed teams.

Glasscubes, however, took me seconds to begin using and, more importantly, to understand how it worked and how I could use it. And even though I had the benefit of a personal demo from the company’s founder, every team member who I brought into the Glasscubes system took to it straight away. When our most creative team members and our most linear team members both felt comfortable within a single solution, I knew we were on to something.

Cost Considerations

One problem with having to piece together multiple solutions can be cost. As a boutique agency, we don’t have massive budgets for technology and while many of the applications we are using have both paid/premium and free versions, we have to pick and choose which ones we can afford to purchase.. Luckily, many of the freemium applications offer a good amount of features for free.

Right now, we are paying $125/month for a professional account with Glasscubes. This is more than we were paying for 5pm, but with the new addition of time tracking on Glasscubes and the overall comfort level everyone on the team has with the solution, we’re feeling the extra expense is worth it. We are still having to pay a minimum of $18/month for 5pm at the moment as we try to figure out how to get our archived files, content and conversations off of that system in an organized fashion.

What are your team’s needs and processes? What are the solutions you are using and how adequate are they?

Editor’s note: If you’re interested in what makes the type of cloud working that Aliza describes in this post possible, check out our Structure conference in June.

Particularly useful is a new feature called “Collaborative Groups.” Using it, anyone can create a group on the fly, and each group comes complete with a group home page, an activity stream that shows group updates, a dedicated microblogging channel and one or more workspaces — ideal for creating a quick collaborative space for an ad hoc team to work on a specific project.

Another new addition that aids the ability of teams to work on projects or in groups is the addition of channels to Socialtext Signals, the site’s built-in microblogging tool. If you only want to view updates from your team, say, or from the “Marketing” group, you can do that through a drop-down menu. When publishing updates, you can elect to send your update to just one group, or all of them. Channels are available through both Socialtext Desktop (the Adobe AIR desktop app) and the web interface.

Additional updates in this release include microblogging search (with the ability to search just in one group, or all of them), activity stream filtering and IM-like presence indication to see when your colleagues are online.

Are you a Socialtext user? What do you think of the update?

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Socialtext

The beta version of Socialtext Mobile supports iPhone, Android and BlackBerry devices. The site detects if you’re logging in with a mobile browser, and automatically directs you to Socialltext Mobile, which has a mobile-optimized interface but still lets you access all of Socialtext’s key functionality, including giving you full access to Socialtext Signals (Socialtext’s private microblogging tool), Activity Streams (keeping you up-to-date with what everyone’s doing), collaboration via Workspace pages, and — perhaps most importantly — access to your colleagues via People (which lets you look up colleagues’ contact details and connect with them while you’re on the go).

Socialtext Mobile comes free with Socialtext, the cost of which varies depending on your needs (a 30-day free trial is available). If you’d like to see a demo of Socialtext Mobile, check out the video.

Let us know what you think of Socialtext Mobile in the comments.

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Here are some needs virtual teams face daily:

Here is a diagram of what we’re currently using as our solutions and which issues and needs each solution addresses. The software we currently use is in orange. Yellow designates the software we are considering.

Where do we go from here?

It seems that Socialtext and GoToMeeting are the next solutions we should integrate. However, how many more SaaS products will we need to cobble together with our current infrastructure in order to meet immediate and upcoming needs as our team continues to grow? I think it’s better to go with solutions that can meet multiple technology needs. When each solution we adopt only tackles one or two functions, there seems to be no way to avoid a technology patchwork quilt. Is there even a system out there — that we just don’t know about — that can provide us with a completely integrated solution. And if so, can we afford it?

In my mind, adding Socialtext and GoToMeeting will certainly meet some immediate needs, but integrating it will take two things that go beyond me simply adopting and paying for the services:

1. We’ll need to define how the new software fits into our overall process and multiple solutions;
2. We need to somehow encourage adoption from the team.

The latter is a key problem. With all of these disparate solutions brought together to make up our tech infrastructure, we are all suffering information overload. Learning and adopting yet another app seems unbearable.

Next on our plate is a virtual PBX system that can accommodate international team members or at least some stitched together work-around to keep a PBX system affordable for a far-flung team.

What systems and software do you have in place to run your virtual team? What other issues are you facing where you still haven’t found an appropriate solution?

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

What’s Included in Free 50

So what do we get for free? Most of the core features of Socialtext are offered as part of Free 50, including:

• the Facebook-like private social network.
• the customized home page dashboard.
• a collaborative workspace that blends wiki and blog functionality.
• Signals, the Twitter-like messaging system.
• Desktop, an Adobe Air desktop application that provides monitoring and access to Socialtext without having to constantly visit the Socialtext web site. ( I wrote about Signals and Desktop previously.)

What’s Not Included

Free 50 doesn’t include tech support or multiple workspaces. If you need help with the software, however, you aren’t entirely on your own as you can visit Socialtext exchange for crowd-sourced technical help.

The lack of multiple workspaces means that if you have anything that needs a more private, collaborative space away from other members of your team, or want to have separate workspaces for different projects, you’ll have to upgrade.

Back when I first spoke with Ross Mayfield, co-founder of Socialtext (read that blog post here), I was excited about what his hosted software solution offered to globally distributed workers. I wasn’t thrilled, however, with the pricing structure because it was too expensive for my own startup, leaving me to pine away for the product from afar while cobbling together my own makeshift solution.

My biggest challenge to adopting Socialtext is convincing a team of people already overwhelmed with social media tools for their personal lives, professional lives and for their work on client projects to adopt yet another technology. I think the selling point for Socialtext to my team will be the desktop app, which should create non-obtrusive yet pervasive access to the team’s conversation.

The other challenge is to find the right balance of use for the Socialtext workspace and features. Mayfield suggests making Socialtext an integral part of the process, not a side tool for communicating or as a knowledge base simply to archive communications and resources. For example, we could make Socialtext the key communications tool for our company calls and meetings to include the agenda, notes, changes and followup notations. By turning Socialtext into part of the overall process, instead of an afterthought, I’m hoping we can strengthen our virtual team with this rich suite of communications and collaboration tools.

Have you been using Socialtext and if so, how has it been working for your organization? If not, what are you using to provide more connectivity and internal communications for broadly distributed teams?

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

(via TechCrunch)

Twitter and other microblogging services are radically shifting the ways in which people communicate and share information. And that shift is now entering the workplace on a large scale, particularly for web workers and for companies who are embracing the ways in which microblogging platforms can save time while increasing productivity.

Yammer, which plays off the already classic Twitter call to action, “What are you doing?” by asking, “What are you working on?” is an easy-to-use microblogging service that is tailored to the workplace and organizations in several important ways.

As Hutch Carpenter boldly states, in a piece called Microblogging Will Marginalize Corporate Email, “As more companies take up microblogging with services like Yammer, Socialcast, Present.ly and SocialText Signals, employee communications amongst employees will both increase and divert away from email.”

Carpenter then presents an equivalently bold image to illustrate how he believes microblogging can reduce the glut of email in the workplace.

Indeed, while I was at South by Southwest in Austin this past week, I heard people joke around to the effect of, “Wouldn’t it be nice if all emails had to be 140 characters or less?” Services like Yammer and Socialcast help to reduce the burden and overload that email brings to the workplace by providing the simple, flexible communication of microblogging with a number of specific work-related features.

While Twitter offers private accounts, services like Yammer and Present.ly impose a higher level of security by locking each network down to only those people who have an individual company email address.

The additional draw of these services in comparison to Twitter are features such as tagging, archiving, groups, attachments and mobile compatibility.

The combination of content aggregation features and microblogging features also offers a powerful way for groups and organizations to communicate and manage tasks and workflow. FriendFeed Rooms is a great example of this, as it allows RSS feeds, messages, links, images and video to be brought into a “room,” or group page (which may be private/invite only or public), with each new post creating the opportunity for a conversation thread. New activity in the room (new threads, posts, comments or “likes”) can be observed by seeing which thread appears at the top of the page.

FriendFeed Rooms has the power to be a game-changer in the microblogging space, creating an easy-to-use yet powerful communications platform for organizations and web workers while helping to reduce email overload. For example, the contributing writers for louisgray.com (of which I’m a member) use FriendFeed Rooms as a primary point of contact and communication.

ididwork is one of my favorite microblogging services, as it provides a sleek and streamlined approach to short real-time communication and archiving while also providing managers with a great task management feature set. Particularly for distributed work teams, ididwork can provide a basis for communication, information management, and work flow while drastically reducing the headache of wading through hundreds of e-mails each day. ididwork for employees is free while ididwork for managers costs $5 per month.

Are microblogging services reducing the number of your work-related emails?

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

Both of these new products are tightly integrated into the Socialtext suite and not something you can use apart from the other tools: Workspace, essentially wiki and blog capabilities; People, for social networking within organizations; and Dashboard, where you can customize what Socialtext activity you see.

New app Signals is a Twitter-like messaging system for work-related status updates, which are added to your Socialtext profile. Saying what you are working on, and sharing that with others, can help bring more context to the conversations and relationships you have with distributed team members. Much like Twitter, you decide which coworkers you would like to follow. As well as reporting their status updates, Signals also monitors other “signals” from the coworkers you are following, such as updates they make to a wiki or a blog, helping you keep tabs on what they are doing. Signals resides on your Socialtext Dashboard as a widget.

Mayfield points out three main uses for Signals:

1. Sharing links and information with others
2. Quick Q&As with team members
3. Sharing context to bring help more cohesion to the team.

Desktop enables you to stay up-to-date with what your coworkers are doing while you aren’t in the Socialtext web environment, keeping you abreast of the activities that you want to track. You can parse the feeds in several ways:

1. “All” shows all activity and status updates, company-wide
2. “Mine” Shows just your status updates and activity
3. “My Colleagues” shows status updates and activity from the people that you are following
4. “My Conversations” enables you to track your conversations

Mayfield describes the confluence of applications in Socialtext as “discovering people through conversations” (facilitated by My Conversations, where you can see who is posting to what you’ve posted) and “discovering content through people”(facilitated by My Colleagues where you can find information through other people’s posts).

The new features are similar to those from other private Twitter-like microblogging services, like Yammer and Present.ly, but the tight integration with the rest of the Socialtext suite means that keeping tabs on your co-workers is effortless, and you don’t have to rely on their status updates to see what they’re doing.

Socialtext offers a 14-day free trail, then prices its service at $15 per user per month. Sadly, this is out of my company’s budget at this time. We have12 people on our virtual team who could really benefit from Socialtext, but we can’t justify $180/month. Even Socialtext’s “Small Business Package” of up to 20 employees for $99/month is outside of our budget.

Still, internal social networking with integrated tools like this can be really useful in building a tighter team, especially when many of the team members don’t know anything about each other, so Socialtext is on my “web app wish list.”

How are you building consistency and cohesion with far-flung web workers on your team?

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• In Q3, NewNet Focus Turns to Business Models and Search

“Someone told me that ‘social’ is so over,” he said, lamenting that his company name may already be dated.

Is “Social” already over? That’s news to me. Those immersed in web work may be sick of the (over)use of the word “social,” particularly if, like me, they’ve been working in the social media space back before anyone called it “social.”

Back in 1995, we called it “community” and “communication.” Heck, we all became social online when we first realized we could communicate with others via our computers on traditional phone lines. Out on the speaking circuit, I talked about how the Internet was all about “connection – not just connecting us to information but also connecting us to people, to one another.”  Sure, we didn’t have the powerful sharing tools that we have today and social networks weren’t even a glimmer on the horizon. Does anyone remember Andrew Weinreich’s “failed” online community SixDegrees.com that paved the way for LinkedIn and the like? That was a social media before it was called social media.

So is “Social” just 2008′s buzzword and on its way out?

For anyone with a company that has “Social” in their name, rest assured, I don’t think that it is over yet. And for anyone out there searching for any available combination of social with another word that might make a good name for a social media business, don’t worry. “Social” is not over yet.

In fact, the general consumer out there is still struggling to understand what a blog is much less a microblog. The term “social media” isn’t even on many people’s radars. The nice thing about “social” is that any non-techie does get what “social” means. But then try to explain to them that “social” now refers to Web 2.0 tools that facilitate collaboration and sharing, and their eyes glaze over. At least many people have now heard the word “social” used in combination with the word “network” often enough in the media, but many of them still think social networks like MySpace are dangerous. Lesson? Let us not forget the learning curve that every new technology and new terminology must go through before mass adoption.

Socialtext, Socialminder, Socialthing? These aren’t household names yet and might not ever be. I’m not knocking any of those companies but for every Socialtext there is a Yammer. For every Socialthing there is aFriendFeed. For ever Socialminder, there’s another contact or CRM management tool.

Think about who these “social” companies are targeting at this time. Not really Mom or Pop. Nor John or Jane Q. Public. Their current customers or members or subscribers tend to be industry types, the iindy Web workers who “get it” or a small pool of IT guys in corporations who also get it.

“Social” as a buzz word simply has not hit the masses.

What do you think of the term “Social?” In your opinion, is it grossly overused or still a useful and viable buzzword that hasn’t even peaked yet?

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview

He spoke about the construction of a social network and how our networks have dense cores (strong ties) surrounded by dynamic peripheries (looser ties).

The core of an organization – such as the leadership team – tends to work closely together. They process information well and can usually make decisions quickly and effectively. The rest of the team, however, is the dynamic periphery and there is strength in these weak ties.

Traditional groupware serves the dense core, says Mayfield, never connecting to the weak ties. However, tapping into the periphery – the distributed team – can accelerate a project and a process cycle. Socialtext is meant to save the time individuals spend seeking information or the right people with the information or skills they need to get a job done.

The traditional way of communicating has been email back and forth with attached files. Many groupware products try to address this disorganized method of communications amongst many, however, the tools are often rigid with a top down structure.

Socialtext 3.0, which debuted at the end of September, is based on a blend of the wiki and the blog.

Every person who is a member of an organization’s Socialtext account gets their own dashboard – or personal “homepage” – where they can embed and arrange via drag and drop both work and personal information, images, and widgets containing video, audio, slides, and any other content they want to display.

Why a homepage for a worker with both professional and personal information? Mayfield believes in the value of an individual displaying their (appropriate) personal interests as well as their work because collaboration is between people. Knowing more about the people with whom you are working – especially when many workers are so far-flung and separated by more than just cubicle walls – can be key to building effective teams.

Work spaces on Socialtext work like both wikis and blogs, collaborative spaces where team members deposit and arrange content with a comments section for feedback from the team. All individuals’ names are hotlinked to their profile which is like a listing in a company directory with standard contact information but also links to their web site, blog, and social media accounts. Any team member can subscribe to the RSS feeds of other team members to keep track of their activities and input. People within an organization can add one another to their Socialtext social network based on common interests or skills and knowledge they need at their fingertips. Tags are used to help you and others label information and even one’s own profile to make it easier to find both.

Email is integrated into the wiki spaces of Socialtext – an email becomes the body of a wiki page. When a page is edited, that information is tracked and made public. When someone comments, everyone can share in that feedback.

Socialtext is meant to scale from a smaller group of 20-50 up to hundreds or thousands of people within a larger enterprise. The cost is $99/month for 20 people with unlimited networks and workspaces and they offer a free 14-day trial.

Mayfield pointed to several major publishing companies who are using Socialtext to map out editorial calendars, post story ideas, manage content as it develops, facilitate group assignments, and handle the day-to-day communications between workers.

Instead of focusing on files as the crux of collaboration, Socialtext focuses on the people who are creating the documents and sending the messages. You can follow who you want, connect with who you choose, and build your own organizational directory based on your needs and goals so you can tap into the right people to help you get the job done. Socialtext makes the dynamic periphery visible and helps everyone tap into the critical talent, knowledge and skill that may not be situated in the dense core.

As a web worker building a virtual team of independent consultants in several different states and time zones, I can see the value of a social networking, communications and collaboration platform like Socialtext although there are only eight of us at the moment.

Still, trying to determine who should be assigned to what client project and who is working on what assignment at any given time is a struggle, not to mention building connections between these independent workers.

Having an internal system where we could identify ourselves and our skills; post and comment on the work at hand; announce new client projects and get input and participation; and tap into one another’s skills and talents would be invaluable.

How would you use an internal, work-related social networking application like Socialtext?

image of core & periphery from Ross Mayfield’s Flickr page

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• The Future of Work Platforms: An Overview