Social Enterprise

Social networking: The next wave of challengers to Twitter and Facebook

By // June 16, 2010, 5:38 AM PST // RickVanover

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  • Identi.ca micro-blogging service

    At face value, Identi.ca looks and feels like Twitter. The 140-character micro-blog notices, as they are called, can link in to other services such as a mobile phone, Twitter, Facebook and others. Identi.ca is an open source product, and it is available for download and customization for your own installation.

  • VOX blog engine

    VOX is a blog engine that is provided by Six Apart, Ltd. Six Apart is most well known for their popular Typepad blog engine.

    Blogs.com and Movable Type are other blog engine products provided by Six Apart to combat the WordPress offering for web-based and on-premise blog engines. Movable Type and other Six Apart products are powering social media brands for a number of web identities, including NPR, NBC, the Washington Post and more.

  • Google's Jaiku

    A volunteer project amongst Googlers, this microblogging site has all the markings of being generally indistinguishable amongst other microblogging sites. One feature allows you to put a Jaikuz icon in front of each post, giving a quick visual categorization to the post – for situations when 140 characters are too long.

  • Blippy

    This service is unique among social media products in that your purchases are shared with your friends, publicly or privately. This includes many popular online outlets as well as your being able to link directly to your bank account or credit card. What? Yes, that’s what Blippy does. I signed up for the service, but didn’t share anything.

  • Gowalla

    One of the new segments of social media is location-based services. These will check-in or otherwise identify a member to a location accessible by others. You will quickly see that popular locations like sports venues, malls, or airports are frequently visited by members. Location-based social media services can be interpreted a number of ways, primarily as a means to advertise if someone is away from home. Like its competing cousin foursquare, Gowalla allows broad integration to other products such as Twitter, Gmail, and Facebook.

  • Jive Social Business Software - Employee

    Jive Software just announced this Social Business platform that wants to be the Facebook for the enterprise. But as GigaOm has pointed out, thus far, social networking and the enterprise have mixed like oil and water.

    Jive's SBS solution has both an employee and public community. On the employee side, you can build a profile, collaborate with team members and others, engage in discussions, and let people know what you're working on.

  • Jive Social Business Software - Public

    Jive SBS also provides a way to build public communities "to boost brand loyalty, solicit product feedback, and provide better customer support." Those interested in an enterprise solution have to contact Jive for pricing.

  • Cisco Quad collaboration

    The other entry in the large enterprise space is Cisco's Quad, which brings social networking aspects to virtual teams that must collaborate on work. It includes four main features: Profiles, Communities, My View, and Participate. The selling point for Cisco is that it brings sophisticated social networking to the enterprise without the risk, allowing roles-based policy management and control of corporate data.

  • Cubicl.com for groups

    Cubicl, "the place for groups," combines aspects of microblogging and real-time chat, but lets you segment your contacts into groups that you choose: friends, work, family, common interest, etc. At least this one recognizes the dreaded "worlds colliding" (yes, that's a Seinfeld reference) aspect that makes Facebook so problematic for some people.

  • Brightkite location-based network

    Brightkite seems to be a pretty popular alternative to Twitter (in that I've actually ran across people who use it). You view Everybody in your location and what they're up to (depending on privacy selections) or just switch to a Friends view of people you actually know. Posting a message, checking in your location (either specific address or general), and adding photos are easily done from a handy, tabbed dashboard. It's a nice, clean interface.

Identi.ca micro-blogging service

At face value, Identi.ca looks and feels like Twitter. The 140-character micro-blog notices, as they are called, can link in to other services such as a mobile phone, Twitter, Facebook and others. Identi.ca is an open source product, and it is available for download and customization for your own installation.

Related Topics:

Social Enterprise Collaboration Software CXO Innovation

By Rick Vanover

Rick Vanover is a software strategy specialist for Veeam Software, based in Columbus, Ohio. Rick has years of IT experience and focuses on virtualization, Windows-based server administration, and system hardware.