Yesterday Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang posted his List of Enterprise Microblogging Tools: Twitter for the Intranet.
“Stemming from commodity technology, I’m sure I’ll have a hard time keeping this list up to date over a few months –expect IM vendors, blogging vendors, community platforms, enterprise 2.0 vendors, and a flurry of startups to offer similiar features, first read up on the pros and cons as well as some potential use cases.
It’s interesting to see the need to justify enterprise needs of such tools that are already being adopted by consumers, typical of enterprise settings (I’m a former enterprise intranet manager). With that said, let’s start the definitive list.”
At the moment, Jeremiah lists includes seven applications, plus four more open source versions in his comments (from John Eckman’s July blog post.) I also sent five messages this morning to companies who are working on something unannounced. That’s sixteen applications that I know of, and surely more on the horizon.
I commented:
My guess is that we will see 20-25 variants come to market within the next 1-2 years. Some will be standalone applications like these, others will be extensions built onto white label social networking platforms behind the firewall. I also expect to see microsharing features built onto other enterprise software for functions.
We’re keeping a close eye on this market, and will encourage our contacts to add their applications to this list. As you know, helping companies and tool vendors understand, test and harness the power of internal microsharing was the impetus behind relaunching Pistachio, which we announced yesterday.
I’d love to talk to any company that’s exploring or testing internal deployments, so that we can profile their experience and lessons learned on our “TouchBase” blog.
And:
Crazy as it sounds, my estimate of the number of tools is conservative. My gut says that more like 100-150 will claim to have an enterprise-grade microsharing app, but a much smaller number will be robust enough to serve the actual need.
This is an interesting space to watch.
