What if your existing enterprise systems, such as your ERP or CRM platform of choice, were to exist within a microblogging environment? The enterprise system becomes a collaborative entity empowered to add information and data to the stream when and where appropriate.

Three vendors have recently sparked my interest for what they are doing that goes beyond simple microblogging and collaboration.

Jevon talks about three vendors that have caught his attention:

• Akibot
• Brainpark
• Tibbr

They remind me a little of past experiments with IBM Lotus Sametime 'bots' that could be used as a simple interface for querying data or pushing information to the right person at the right time through instant messaging. However, these new tools that Jevon has identified are designed to be more than simply passive or reactive interfaces - instead they are part of the stream of activity, interpreting or responding to activity in an intelligent way.

Of course, even integration of data to and from the stream can be useful. In the comments, Socialcast point out that Socialcast Ease offers integration with other enterprise and Web 2.0 systems through its API. I'm also reminded of Attensa's Streamserver, although while this isn't traditionally treated as a microblogging tool it offers some similar activity stream capabilities and also offers an API.

Also, having spent three days last week in a training workshop looking at IBM Lotus Connections and getting under the hood of its API, I'm conscious that there is a range of other social platforms ready and able to help integrate social and application information and activity.

But before we get too excited, Jevon makes a good point at the end of his post that its important we don't use these new capabilities to simply create additional 'noise' for customers and people inside organisations (i.e. a positive filter failure). I'd also add that in doing this we should seek to get the balance right between human and computed intelligent middleware for the best result.

Mark Nash proposes a nice little social media triaging system (Critical > Delayed > Rejected).

It reminds me that I blogged about being ruthless with RSS feeds back in 2007, but since that time the volume and access to different information and activity streams has definitely grown. Unfortunately it is also a reminder that our personal information practices that ultimately define our ability to control information overload continue to lag.

I wrote another piece about living with email, touching on similar issues. While the technologies are different, the common themes are:

• Information overload is as much a result of poor information managament practices as it is about the volume of information created by the technology.
• Individuals can't deal with information overload on their own, it requires collective effort (there are a number of dimensions to this).

Unfortunately, at least in an organisational context, until we start taking information work more seriously I think many people will continue to find information overload an issue.

In the meantime, remember that its ok to be ruthless with your social activity consumption.

The debate about personalization vs. segmentation on the intranet has been much discussed and researched by many pioneering intranet designers and consultants. As keen observers of user behaviour in the real world, we believe that well chosen default options are a sound design strategy. Adoption rates of personalization features are low, driven by a lack of understanding of the business benefit from the user and the inertia of human nature to simply be lazy and accept defaults. By placing the user at the centre of the information universe and using their relationships to information and each other as the default filter, we can provide them with an intuitive view of their world, making significant progress towards our goal of a more relevant and valuable intranet.

The team at ThoughtFarmer often have interesting things to say about intranets - in this case, Gordon Ross' guest post on the Dachis Collaboratory describes the benefits of implicit personlisation on intranets. This is an important idea that is reflected conceptually in both McAfee's Enterprise 2.0 SLATES model and Dachis/Headshift's Social Business Design archetypes.

Personally I wouldn't say users are lazy as such, but it is true that people take the path of least resistance. Until relatively recently we also didn't have mainstream access to the technologies that support implicit personalisation plus we lacked the organisational maturity to actually place the user at the centre. However, this is now changing.

Robin's post has grabbed a lot of people's attention over the last 24 hours, and its not surprising. When Paolo from eVectors demo'd their technology to me I was really impressed too - in fact, the front end of the Climate Pulse example gives only a few clues about the engine that enables the curating process that Robin describes to happen.

However, my immediate thought when I saw Climate Pulse was, wouldn't this also make a good concept for an intranet?

Could it in fact be possible to shift from the idea of managing content on intranets and instead think about curating it instead? Its an interesting idea that could make intranets more relevant - just like dashboards for metrics have become popular, can we also imagine dashboards for content and activity that are curated by people, not dumb algorithms?