List of Enterprise Microblogging Tools: Twitter for the Intranet

With the popularity to Twitter and other Microblogging tools, we should expect to see a flurry of simliar tools for project and program mangaement for the enterprises.

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.

List of Enterprise Microblogging Tools
I’ll be making lots of updates to this post as comments come in.

Prologue, by Automatic, makers of WordPress
Announced in Jan 08, Prologue allows users to, “…can post short messages about what they’re doing”, even in a secured environment GigaOm has adopted it for his news network, recently covered by Venturebeat.

Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment (ESME)
This pet project which was given birth by the “Demo Jam” at SAP labs (This is an SDN Community Project initiated by SAP Mentors, not part of SAP), was recently covered by Read Write Web.

Yammer
Simply detailed as: “What’s happening at your company? Share status updates with your co-workers.” recently reviewed by webware. This in depth review answers many questions. Launched in Sept 08.

SocialCast
A friendfeed and twitter tools for the enterprise, this has been covered by Webware.

Laconica – The Open Microblogging Tool
This open source application can be installed on servers and potentially used within the firewall. Link via Nick Cowie via comments.

Status
“Status is part of a new trend of LIGHTER communication tools. When you need to get up to date with your group, a single screen shows what everyone is doing and where they are. This means you can stay in touch on your own terms, without using heavy attention-stealing tools like email.” link via Frank. added Sept 9, 08.

Trillr
“Trillr is a service for co-workers, partners and customers to communicate and thus stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What’s on your mind”. By CoreMedia. Link via Pistachio Consulting (focused on Micromedia), added Sept 9, 08.

I Did Work
This task based update tool provides teams with abiity to leave status messages. “The work log that shares Keep a history of your work, and share it with your team” Link via Ralf via comments.

OraTweet -Oracle
Oracle’s launching a Microblogging tool internally, then for external clients: “…OraTweet is seeing companies, universities, and organizations running their own OraTweet instance, allowing them to keep their information private yet strengthening their own internal communities. It should be the same way we do email and instant messaging: We manage our own information, which allows us to broadcast messages safely in our own microcosm.” Added Sept 9, 08.

Joint Contact
This collaboration suite has microblogging features, and hooks into titter: “…A better way to Twitter. As a small business owner you’ve added micro blogging to your list of daily marketing activities. In the past few months you’ve come to appreciate how easy and effective tools like Twitter can be to communicate project status and to inform followers of upcoming events. You currently manage your postings using a desktop Twitter client. It would be great if you could somehow link your “Tweets” with your project management system.” Added Sept 9, 08.

BlueTwit-IBM
An internal only twitter client has been deployed for some time, and has been providing some colleagues with relief from email flare-ups. It was recently covered in BusinessWeek (link via pistachio) –BlueTwit has been around since 2007.

Present.ly
“Present.ly is a micro-update communications tool for your company. Give your employees the ability to instantly communicate their current status, ask questions, post media, and more.” Via comments of Pistachio, added Sept 11, 08.

Mixin
Spanning both the internal and external worlds, Mixin: “… lets you share your daily activities and intentions
to get together more often with your friends”

Headmix
“HeadMix has powerful messaging and social networking features that promote the capture, sharing and discovery of the knowledge trapped inside employees’ heads.”

I’ll stop managing this list after a few weeks, I know an onslaught of features will appear in just about every imaginable software package, you can leave comments below, as always, if someone creates and index, I’ll point to it.

See this list of opensource twitter vendors. Also, Laura “Pistachio” has now started a form to populate her database of vendors. She’s now published a spreadsheet on mashable.

Also, I should add that Forrester is watching this space, aside from our CEO and many employees using these tool, we’ve a report with data showing use of microblogging tools.

Have you deployed this at your company?
Rafe of Webware and I would love to know, please contact me if you have, my email is on my contact page.

I already know of a some community platforms that are experimenting with similar tools, expect this to be a bolt of feature that many will provide in the next few moons.

If you know of others, leave a comment below, oh and if you like this list, you’ll love these.

177 Replies to “List of Enterprise Microblogging Tools: Twitter for the Intranet”

  1. Just ran into:

    Grouptweet, but it’s not secured behind the firewall so it doesn’t count

    http://grouptweet.com/

    “GroupTweet is constantly listening for direct texts sent to your group’s Twitter account. When a direct text is received, GroupTweet instantly publishes it as a tweet from the group account. Since all of your group members are following the group’s Twitter account, they will each receive the message”

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  3. I’m a proverbial n00b to social media, but I have worked in IT for over a decade now… I’m interested as to how this benefits a corporation in your opinion(s) as opposed to newsgroups, wiki’s, KB’s, IM, and SaaS PM offerings?

    In other words, if Twitter is an indication of distraction, would not corporate micro-blogging be the same?

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  5. We used WordPress and the prologue theme in the naming exercise for our company. We liked the experience so much that we wanted a microblogging based site in our project management arsenal. So we deployed a version of WordPress MU with Prologue as the default theme. When we have a new client/project we simply add a new blog within our MU site.

    Its great because we can password protect the discussion, we can also tags to associate the various memes that take place within a project.

    Have also found that clients are more willing to participate with us there as it is less imposing to them than Basecamp. Here’s a writeup: http://tinyurl.com/6cvk29

  6. JJ Toothman, that idea rings true with me… I had some moderate success in rolling out basecamp to a few of our clients, but very limited interaction. I might just have to look into this. I have been toying around with this idea in SharePoint, but that does not seem as compartmentalized so I have to be careful of the edges on that…

    thank you for sharing your thoughts as well Jeremiah…

  7. We’ve been using GroupTweet internally for 3-month and it’s working well. Allows employees to choose between public tweets and group (interna) tweets.

  8. Jeremiah, I’m thrilled to see you pulling this list together. There are a large number of tools in development, not all of which have announced publicly.

    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.

  9. The most valuable thing about Twitter is it allow a variety of inputs and services for input (e.g. web, SMS, IM, desktop apps, etc.). The most valuable of these for microsharing is text messaging, but most of the non-Twitter microsharing services on the open web do not have this functionality.

    Have you started putting a matrix function list of tools yet?

  10. Vanderawal

    The websites are not that descriptive (except for the very detailed open source version of ESME, which is nearly written as technical documentation)

    If the websites had more descriptions of their services, I’d add more details.

  11. Just stumbled onto another one, Yammer, that I have not seen before.

    http://www.yammer.com/

    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.

  12. Laura

    Yammer just launched yesterday at Techcrunch 50. They’ve significant funding the product looks refined, I’m giving it a try soon.

    Yup, the list will grow, as I listed above, this will become a ‘feature’ on many existing software tools.

    I’ll prob stop updated this and just allow comments to list them out (I had to do this with a few other lists)

  13. @Vanderwal we’re hoping to start putting together such a matrix in the near future, as more of these tools announce themselves and we can test their claims and feature sets.

    Several other open-source Twitter clones could potentially be adapted to use behind the firewall:
    Yonkly, Twoorl, Jisko and Sweetter 2.0. John Eckman of Optaros blogs about them here.

  14. @vanderwal and @pistachio

    At some point, a matrix or a list like this becomes moot.

    This technology is a commodity, and will be integrated in many communication tools. It’ll be like comparing cell phone interfaces. Sure, helpful, but there are going to be many contenders.

  15. I guess the technology is not what is important. We’ve built a corporate Twitter clone called trillr just to experiment and it accidentically became very successful. 98% of the collegues tried it and over 70% used it in the last month. And we’re on the way of having more external guests than employees as users.

    What seems important to me is that not every community lifts of and it’s important to understand how to encourage and support the lift off process.

    Drop me a note or join trillr if you’re interested in numbers, experiences, people.

  16. Sweet list! I was just saying a few weeks ago that it would be productive for employees to create status updates to communicate what they are working on from time to time throughout the day as well as the web dev team and IT team to update project/site status.

    Some employees will not adopt until they realize a utility on their own so introducing these technologies via intranet is the way to get the door opened for a company to be more open to external adoption.

  17. Good point, Adam. Here at CoreMedia the usage of trillr for private activities like sailing, running, soccer, cycling… led to a faster adoption within the more IT reluctant employees.

  18. i wish we had a Twitter clone in our intranet.
    its five months since we have started working with
    snooggie.com as an internal instant messaging.
    its an amazing instrument for a company but it needs the Twitter feature, i hope it will ad it to their system.
    rob

  19. I recently ran across http://www.ididwork.com which definitely falls into the category of enterprise microblogging tools. It features tags, roles and simple charts that allow to see which log entries have been viewed by the managing person.

  20. Great list.

    One really cool thing about Prologue, asides from its being free/open, is how easy it is to customize for anyone with a little Worpdress experience — which is a lot of people.

    I’ve been toying around with it myself, just for kicks — http://www.prologio.com.

    Makes me appreciate the architectural sophistication of Twitter — harder than it looks!

  21. Hi Jeremiah, fantastic list. At the web agency where I work, a few coworkers have been trying to start an internal microblogging initiative. This list is a great help… only one comment, that services such as Yammer store their data in the cloud, and that makes us hesitant to use it to discuss internal affairs.

  22. Hi there,

    I have another one to add to the list. There is BlueTwit which is an internal microblogging environment at IBM.

    Its been gowning slowly over the last 18 months and is already on it second total rewrite.

    It’s not a formal program in any way at the moment, but as use grows who knows.

    Unfortunately there is no link to share at the moment as it’s still locked up behind the firewall.

  23. We about to launch Upswing360.com, which fuses enterprise update features and internal social networking with something of proven use and success: CRM. Think Yammer and (a much improved) Salesforce CRM merged together and you’ve got Upswing.

  24. Thanks for this posting.

    Our company’s online project management and collaboration solution (named Joint Contact) was extended this past summer to support direct integration with Twitter. Joint Contact has been one of the first commercial uses of micro-blogging for business and we’ve received a number of inquires from the press and other interested parties.

    In Joint Contact, Twitter is used as secondary project notification system, similar to email. We also allow for group members to update their online profiles which can be seen by others through Joint Contact or directly over the Internet through Twitter.

    We would be happy to provide any information or feedback on our experiences with Twitter. If you would like more information feel free review our press page or contact me directly.

  25. Thanks Wayne

    This looks like this is a feature of an application.

    I’m prob going to stop updating this list real soon, as I’m not going to be able to keep it updated.

  26. You missed http://www.mixin.com it is also a micro blogging tool, but also a micro scheduling tool. It is cool to know what people are doing, but it is even better to know what people are going to do. mixin.com parses you messages and posts them in a timeline. Then the discussion begins until the event happens. And the best for the end. If you publish medias on Flickr, Picasa or Qik mixin.com will aggregate them based on the date of the medias (exif) and the date of the event.

    You can publish your micro events on the web, but also from your mobile, IM and even Twitter.

  27. Jeremiah – great list. Wanted to alert you to http://www.samepoint.com, a conversational search engine. Enterprises can create a RSS feed on a given company, brand, product, etc. and track all the conversations taking place across hundreds of thousands of social media sites. Not just for enterprises, but consumers can also use the site to track topics of interest to them. Would love to hear your feedback on what we’re doing. Thanks.

  28. TCS uses a microblogging platform called Quix internally in some groups.In addition to the basic feature set, it has multiple message categories like Ideas,Announcements,Questions and General. It also supports channels and has social graph visualization.

  29. Jeremiah, a consummer is also a co-worker 😉 And you can definitely use it in the enterprise. See Yammer for example who won the TC50. It is co-worker oriented, but as a co-worker, do you want to manage two different services to discuss with co-workers and friends and potential clients. NO !

    So in mixin.com, you can use it for your private life and for your job. That is why we implement a strong privacity structure that allow you to share nor not what you want to publish. And this privacity stuff was not an easy task to to ;-(

    So I say that we are not focused on consumer, because you can also use it in your company, just invite co-worker and create “sets” to share information only inside your company.

    Your co-workers are only a part of your friends.

    If you see, we can already sync google calendar with mixin.com. With Outlook 2007, it is also possible to share/subscribe calendars. So if you want to publish your public information to mixin, just subscribe in mixin.com to your public Outlook calendar.

    And if you have any other suggestions, don’t hesitate to use the feedback button on our website.

  30. frederic

    I get it, Mixin.com is for both internal and external usage. For this particular use case that I’m looking at, it’s for internal only.

    It’s going to be hard to draw the line between what’s internal and external in the future.

  31. GroupChat Sequoia is a project to bridge corporate IM solutions with the strength of Twitter microblogging.

    The approach is to take Jabber based chat rooms and associate it with Twitter accounts; achieving seamless message flow between these systems and transforming Twitter accounts into rooms.
    The effect is to combine benefits of realtime messaging with social networking principles.

    An overview is kept in this wiki: http://www.think5.de/sequoia

    Basically for companies the solution is a white label infrastructure for integration in web portals.

  32. Just a quick note saying that we have deployed in trial the Laconica server, integrated into LDAP for authentication and via simple RSS to the Intranet. Early days yet (about 3 weeks) but take up is encouraging. The best thing is that we have found staff taking an interest in other staff projects coupled with I believe a greater group awareness of overall organisational activities.

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  36. Traction Software’s Live Blog was announced in November 2008. It is a micro-messaging interface for the TeamPage E2.0 Social Software platform supporting workspace oriented wiki, blog, tagging, discussion, and document management.

    The Live Blog capability offers microsharing over the stable infrastructure so it inherits the same notification, search, versioning, access control, directory integration and other traits of the platform it runs on. So, it is not constrained by the typical limits of micro-sharing, but benefits from the platform facilities that it runs on. As well, development time was counted in hours or “day” rather than months.

    Demo video here:
    http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/traction/permalink/Product577

  37. Microblogging is so addictive. I like to Twitter everyday with my friends and talk about just anything. I also have some blogs but i update frequently my Twitter more than my WordPress blog.

  38. Hi Jeremiah. Thanks for the mention. I work on the Presently enterprise microblogging platform and wanted to let you know that we support the following:

    – We have native apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile.
    – We support Microsoft Sharepoint.
    – In addition to our free secure hosted SASS version of Presently we also offer a behind the firewall solution.

    Your readers can read more about Presently via our blog: http://presentlyapp.com/blog

  39. Hi Jeremiah. Thanks for the mention. I work on the Presently enterprise microblogging platform and wanted to let you know that we support the following:

    – We have native apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile.
    – We support Microsoft Sharepoint.
    – In addition to our free secure hosted SASS version of Presently we also offer a behind the firewall solution.

    Your readers can read more about Presently via our blog: http://presentlyapp.com/blog

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  41. Jeremiah, why have you left off Sharetronix/BlogtronixMicro from this list? We have over 9000 communities in 120 countries. We have an opensource, and an enterprise version. We have advanced multimedia sharing, groups, and API integration. http://www.sharetronix.com

  42. Hi Jeremiah, just run into this post.
    I am leading a project in the company I work for to suggest one of these tools. Our CTQs basically are LDAP authentication, on-premises hosting, the possibility of embedding the tool with our portal and Blackberry app; being the on-premises hosting the more important one. I am checking at present.ly, any other suggestion?
    Alfredo

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