Beyond recent changes: Socialtext 3.0
April 21, 2008 :: by lars 2 responses
Socialtext has announced version 3.0 of their wiki platform. Two major new features are personal dashboards and dynamic people profiles.
These are examples of how consumer internet technology continues to migrate to the enterprise and both help bring the promise of social networking within the firewall closer.
In client workshops, one of the requirements we regularly come across at Headshift is a dashboard style interface. (Dashboards are a component of our pyramid of social tools.)
Wikis come with ways to monitor recent changes but what we learn when talking to people is that they want a single screen where recent changes are displayed together with other kinds of updates (iGoogle style).
The types of updates that are relevant could include new stuff on the intranet, news updates, latest internal blog posts, external rss feeds and other subscriptions, a list of new starters and people's own facebook mini-feed.
Viewing the facebook mini-feed on the dashboard at work was mentioned at a workshop in a large law firm; it became an instant hit with the rest of the group. The suggestion inspired a counter-suggestion that a dashboard should feature mandatory feeds as well as modules chosen by the user.
The two suggestions are not mutually exclusive and an interesting aspect of Socialtext's announcement is that their new dashboard does both. Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield explained that people can configure their own dashboard and decide what widgets to display. Widgets can include filters on wiki content, internally developed widgets as well as iGoogle / Open Social widgets. The platform also supports role-based dashboard modules that are defined by an administrator.
The dynamic people profiles, the other major new feature in 3.0, promotes the social networking aspects of wiki working. Wikis are great ways of discovering others who share your interests or field of expertise (because they edit or comment on the same pages). The new version improves profile pages and introduces buddylists and the ability to tag people.
Connecting people with people is the natural next step from connecting people with information.
Socialtext 3.0 is currently in private beta.
What do you think?
This is a breakthrough from a learning perspective!
What current learning installations have been lacking is the social gathering perspective... if only I could bring the dynamic sociability I can achieve in a Ning type environment, together into the wiki/blog platform and layer it with a FaceBook style feeds... then we really have a knock out platform!
ABB ;-)
Thanks for the analysis Lars, really useful.