Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Launched Socialtext Signals and Socialtext Desktop

By now, you might have seen some of the buzz from our launch of Socialtext Signals (video) and Socialtext Desktop (video). I really encourage you to try the new Adobe AIR app, a whole new way to use Socialtext. The official press release is here and here is what our customers are saying:

And what the press and blogosphere is saying:

Socialtext Collaboration Platform Gains Microblogging - PC World

"Each communication and collaboration tool demands a different degree of effort and attention. Writing a Signals entry is a small gesture, so by itself it generates a small amount of value. But put together with everyone else's gestures, you get a collective view of what's going on, which is important for companies that want to execute better," Aparicio said.

Socialtext Brings Status Updates to the Enterprise - Mashable 

Frankly, Socialtext’s approach makes a lot more sense than some of what we’ve seen so far in the “Twitter for business” market. By connecting status updates with a broader suite of business applications and activity streams, it would seem to make connecting the right people and information easier, versus needing to use yet another application. Of course, it also means you need to implement Socialtext within your organization, which is a decision that will be based on a lot more than just its microblogging features.

Socialtext Adds Twitter-like "Signals" And a Desktop AIR App - TechCrunch

In yet another sign that this will be the year of the activity stream, Socialtext is adding a Twitter-like message stream to its enterprise wiki/workspace service, The new feature is called Socialtext Signals, and it appears both as a widget in the Socialtext dashboard and as a standalone desktop app built on Adobe AIR.

Twitter Social Spam & Search

Knowledge is a dangerously wonderful thing. Especially about things that effect large groups of people that are unfolding in real time.

This week, for example, a phishing scam hacked Gtalk to make it look like your friends were trying to get you to click on a link to a video.  This is where Twitter comes in, as when I think my social network is hacked, I'll check my social network and it tends to help defend itself.  With one glance at my followers and a near time search of Twitter, I figured out it was a scam and passed on the word to my followers.

Such stories are increasingly common. The group connected defends itself. I'd even bet there is some correlation between the distribution of the virus and when it waned, and when the alert network worked. And wouldn't be too surprised if some of the Google engineers in charge found out about it through social messaging before their algorithms got their attention.

In yesterday's post on Mourning the loss of Twitter, I updated it with Clay Shirky's suggestion that the whitelist for @reply spam could be FOAF. What would be interesting about such models is the game of regulating our friends. When someone lets bad stuff onto the network, if made visible, may make accountable.  And the alert network would take over, pleading for that person to take it off or in some cases unfollowing that person. 

This self-social engineering is different from the self-engineering you do today in regulating the list of who you follow. If the idea takes form, it probably won't be in Twitter's code first. Nor as a tool against spam.

Wouldn't you like to search what your friends said? What the friends of your friends said? Today you can search on what one person said and/or what was said to one person. This is because of the conventions of @replies and how Twitter tracks them. But it just scrapes the surface of social search. I'll bet somewhere someone is working on social search for twitter, which could also create a whitelist service.