Jive Software today launched what it hopes will become a Facebook-style social networking platform for businesses, complete with an activity stream for internal communications, an open API and an open application store. The company also announced that it is licensing the Twitter “firehose” — an index of all 65 million tweets that are posted to the service daily — and will be offering Jive software through the Google Apps marketplace. Jive’s launch is the latest attempt to bring social networking to the enterprise, but this is a market that has so far balked at jumping on board the social bandwagon, and the odds of failure are high.

“Enterprise is the next big opportunity in social networking,” said Christopher Lochhead, the company’s chief strategy officer. “Until now, most of the innovation in that area has been coming on the consumer side. For the most part, the last 10 years or so has been the lost decade for the enterprise, and we want to change that.” According to Lochhead, Jive is “the largest and fastest-growing social business services company” with more than 3,000 customers and a total of over 15 million users of its software platform, which is now called Social Business Software (formerly Clearspace).

Lochhead and Jive Software co-founder Matt Tucker, who is also the company’s chief technology officer, said they want to bring the benefits of social networking — and open standards — to the corporate sector, while still giving companies the control they need to achieve the security and other criteria they require. Launching today at the Enterprise 2.0 conference is a single dashboard-style view of that pulls in whatever relevant information an employee needs to know, Tucker says, whether that comes from Twitter or email or a shared document on the intranet. The company calls this view “Jive What Matters.”

Tucker says the other big initiative is an application marketplace, which will allow developers to create small, lightweight apps that can integrate into Jive’s dashboard, in the same way Google apps can be embedded into a Google custom homepage. Apps could employ features that come from Jive, the co-founder says, but could also use functions from SAP’s software if a company uses that, or other systems that are common in corporate environments. And Jive is building in support for open standards such as OAuth and Google’s OpenSocial as well.

The rationale behind Jive’s new offering seems sounds — anyone who has seen a Facebook wall will recognize the “What Matters” view instantly, and if the company can manage to pull together the various streams of information from Twitter to email to internal document feeds, it might have a shot at actually making some companies more social and more efficient at the same time. But the odds are stacked against it.

Despite the explosion in popularity of social networking tools and services over the past few years, so far no one has really extended this kind of social revolution to the enterprise successfully. The big software companies and enterprise vendors have tried in a variety of ways — including Microsoft with its SharePoint platform, which has wiki-style pages and built-in messaging, and Salesforce.com with a Twitter-style service called Chatter — but so far social networking and the corporate environment seem to be a little like oil and water, never quite blending.

In part, that could be because of corporate standards governing firewalls and security and the need for robust software that can be licensed, installed and maintained by large IT departments — as opposed to the web world of beta software, open standards and an anything-goes kind of approach to social networks and information sharing. Whether Jive’s blend of open APIs, an open app marketplace and installed software can successfully bring these two worlds together remains to be seen.

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It is still hanging around, thanks to $10 million venture capital infusion it received in June 2008 from Lehman Venture Partners. They fell from my active-coverage list. Today they sent over a press release touting Freeconnect, their free member-to-member calling service, that has been tried unsuccessfully by other VoIP start-ups.

FreeConnect is easy-to-use. Jaxtr members simply enter the number of the jaxtr member they wish to call. Jaxtr will then give them a local number to reach that person. Once they initiate the call, jaxtr notifies the person they are calling, and will give that person a local number to call, too – allowing the parties to connect directly. They can then talk for as long as they like, free of any charge from jaxtr. These assigned local phone numbers can also be used again by the same parties on an ongoing basis.

That announcement made me feel like Rip Van Winkle who just woke up. If my memory serves me right, this is just another variation on Rebtel’s initial model, one they launched with back in 2006. After realizing that they weren’t going anywhere, Rebtel (somewhat) re-focused and now (supposedly) makes a decent living. The whole process of using Jaxtr to make free phone calls seems so cumbersome and in this day of increasingly cheap wireless plans – almost pointless.

Now even if Jaxtr’s new offering does become popular — odds of that happening are lower than chances of baseball slugger Manny Ramirez returning to Boston — how is Jaxtr going to make money? Free calls don’t make money but they surely incur costs. Advertising isn’t going to cover the costs — at least not while this deep recession lasts.

“We believe a big portion of the free callers will convert to paid calling… The number of people who do that can make up for the people who only do free calls,” Bahman Koohestani, chief executive of the company told VentureBeat.

Maybe I should offer to sell him an investment opportunity in Bernie Madoff’s fund!

You should check out my twitter conversation with Jaxtr co-founder. 1. 2. 3. 4.

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In response to my previous post, EQO CEO Bill Tam said that cuts would allow the company to operate near profitability. He also claimed that the company had 2 million users, was doubling every eight weeks and growing its revenues. Apparently, that wasn’t enough.

EQO had raised about $13 million and was trying to sell itself, but apparently it didn’t find any buyers, according to the report. Some of my sources are confirming this shutdown. There has been chatter about VCs trying to claw back unspent cash, though I have not been able to confirm it. Some senior executives, including CFO Laura Colwill, have been job hunting. A sure sign that the party is over: information about the management team has been removed from EQO’s About Us page.

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By doing well, I guess he means Fring’s deal with Mobilkom Austria and an increase in the number of monthly downloads from 100,000 a year ago to 400,000. Mobile advertising is one way it hopes to make money, but it seems like a long shot. Like many of its peers, Fring is going to have a tough time in the future. Jangl and TalkPlus have already shut down, while EQO recently fired 65 percent of its workforce. Jaxtr, another VoIP startup, recently had a management shakeup and has its own set of issues. Other Fring competitors would include iSkoot and Nimbuzz.

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When it launched, we were intrigued by EQO because it was one of the first clients out there that allowed you to make Skype calls from a regular phone. Making Skype mobile was an opportunity that slipped away from EQO mostly because competitor iSkoot was better funded and had a better execution strategy. In August 2006, EQO got into a bit of a tiff with Skype. The company then refocused on social networks, but it seems even that strategy didn’t go anywhere. EQO raised another $9 million in August 2007.

Funny thing about these rumored job cuts is that the company has been supporting more and more mobile phones and was supporting all high-growth devices. The job cuts, if true, don’t bode well for the long-term health of the company. VoIP as an industry has proved to be hard nut to crack for startups, especially those aiming for the consumer market. Jangl and TalkPlus were two startups that hit the deck earlier this year. We are going to see more of these “save money on LD” phone apps with no discernible business model and relatively little traction or loyalty to follow suit. 

* Approximately

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For instance, 77.18 percent of Argentineans love MSN, followed by 9.99 percent who love GTalk. Mexicans (83.72 percent), Brazilians (77.18 percent) Dutch (65.41 percent), French (68.01 percent), Italians (60.45 percent) the Turks (75.6 percent) are all big MSN users. In many parts of Asia, Yahoo is big.

In Germany, however, they heart ICQ, while in the United States AIM (35 percent) still rules with Yahoo (25 percent) and MSN (23.93 percent) getting the silver and the bronze. GTalk has just over 12 percent share in the United States — a surprisingly large number. Another surprising fact about the numbers is how marginal AIM is outside of the States.

My only quibble with this data: Why no Skype, which is a very popular IM client/service across the world? If I remember correctly, EQO started off by offering mobile access to Skype, but later changed its game after being ignored by Skype.

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