Socialtext 3.0!

Yay, we've announced Socialtext 3.0!

What I'm really pleased with is how Socialtext 3.0 has unfolded naturally from what Socialtext has always been.

Ross, Adina, Ed and I founded Socialtext on the idea of social software for business. We took wiki and the wiki nature as a totem (as Ward would say a few years later) for a way of people interacting and accomplishing great things. From there we've tried to continue to build solid tools for creating community and collaboration within a business setting.

Last year, we were very lucky to find Eugene Lee and entice him to come on board to help us scale the business. Hiring a new CEO into a startup can be a little scary, and I'm not certain Eugene or the folks at Socialtext were 100% sure what would happen, even though we hit it off well right away.

But the news is in -- we're doing great. Eugene turns out to have social software genes going way back, and real, been-there-done-that enterprise experience, too.

Eugene's diagnosis is that we had the core of something great, and we just needed to s-t-r-e-t-c-h it out some more. He likes to say that of the various social software tools, wiki is the best one to build on as a foundation, because of the way it's built around participation.

So here we are, s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g the Socialtext wiki. Building social software for business, moving conversations from private to shared, from closed inboxes out to publish/subscribe models. Distributing work and empowering teams, but also aggregating their work efficiently.

Which has been my dream all along.

Okay, let me recap what we've announced.

There's whiz-bang stuff: Socialtext Dashboard, which is a personal portal that aggregates all your Socialtext (and other OpenSocial stuff!) into one view; and Socialtext People, a lightweight social network that picks up on the familiarity people have now with SNSes and brings it into the enterprise.

Together, these will help our core wiki become friendlier, more inviting, and capable of managing more of your total information flow, in a more social way.

Another part of our announcement is less whizzy, but in practice, at least as important. we've distilled our five years of experience with implementing social solutions in business into four "solution areas" -- Collaborative Intelligence, Participatory Knowledgebase, Flexible Client Collaboration, and Business Social Networks -- themes and pattern sets for successful implementation of social software in business.

That helps us, the whole Socialtext team, understand better what we're building and selling, and it helps our customers understand better what they're buying and implementing.

It's never been a problem for the early adopters, but the trick with social software is that it's only interesting when a lot of people use it. And so the need to find good ways to describe what's being implemented, and to have a big pattern library of implementations to draw from.

All in all, I'm really excited about Socialtext 3.0 (et seq, it's going to be a fun year! ;-).