In the past six months, Southeastern [a UK railway operator] has leveraged Socialtext Connect, a flexible and robust developer toolset built on our REST API that enables developers to socially enable existing systems of record, such as ERP, CRM, or content management systems. The Socialtext solution, now integrated into the Southeastern infrastructure, enables employees to access train status information on the fly, in real-time with visibility across the entire workforce. By providing Southeastern with a more efficient way to share knowledge, expertise, ideas and information, the company can more quickly respond to change and serve their patrons effectively.

And you thought social inside the enterprise was all about staff telling each other what they had for lunch?

The marketplace for enterprise activity stream is a crowded one these days, with vendors all types offering solutions. This includes enterprise software company SAP, who launched their own solution back in 2009 originally in beta as 12sprints and then rebranded as StreamWork.

While there are many similarities, StreamWork is slightly different from other activity stream tools. Not surprisingly it has a strong task orientation - StreamWork primarily support two views - a main status feed and activities. Hashtags are supported, but other than activities there are no groups. It also provides an instant messaging tool.

Activities are mini-project workspaces (similar to the activities concept in IBM Connections) and you can add from a selection of StreamWork and a small selection of 3rd party widgets. These widgets help you with basic tasks and information management but there are tools to help with coordinating, deciding and analysing. For example:

• Agendas and timelines. 
• Ranking, pro-con, and cost-benefit tables. 
• Consensus votes and quick polls. 
• SWOT and responsibility matrices.

SAP appear to be positioning StreamWork as being a tool for action and one of the obvious gaps is the lack of features that support workforce engagement, informal collaboration and knowledge management.

However, I was pleasantly surprised that StreamWork provides an API and also supports OpenSocial (incidentally, Atlassian Confluence is one example of the kind of integration that is possible). There are mobile apps for the BlackBerry (of course, this is SAP) and the iPhone. Personally, I think the Web interface is better than the iPhone, which is usable but could be better.

There are a couple of case studies out there about the people who are using StreamWork:

• a 50 person humanitarian aid organisation; and 
• a Swiss furniture manufacturer.

You can take StreamWork for spin yourself by signing up for an account on the free edition.

Lee Bryant is co-founder of Headshift, the world's biggest social business consultancy. He believes email's dominance over business communications is coming to an end.

"When email was first developed it was an excellent point-to-point communication tool when nothing else existed," says Mr Bryant.

"I think we've reached the stage where email as means of communicating is overloaded. I think we will see what happens on email today transitioning towards various kinds of both internal and consumer facing social tools."

These are "flow-based" tools such as wikis, micro-blogging and internal social networks, according to Mr Bryant.

"I think fundamentally one of the biggest problems is that social tools communicate slightly more in the open, they create ambient knowledge and ambient awareness for others who are not even in the conversation," says Mr Bryant.

"Email doesn't do that, it's quite a lonely medium.

Lee isn't saying email (or email like) communication is dead, but that it is being pushed out of the way by more appropriate styles of open and flow-based communication tools.

Nathaniel Borenstein, co-creator of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) protocol, was also interviewed for this article - I do agree with his comment that the universal addressing that modern email support is a good thing, but that this is "not a definition of email."

Unfortunately, we don't yet have true universal addressing across social tools (even with OpenID, I'm sure most users will have identified themselves somewhere via an email account) and email continues to play a role as a personal identifier for using social tools. Similarly, into systems like CoachSurfing, use a physical snail-mail postcard as part of their user verification system.

You would think that the idea of integrating "social" into workflow was something new, but I've been eyeing "Enterprise RSS" as an opportunity for integrating activity and information into work since at least 2007. Attensa is one of those original companies from that time that has continued to focus on this idea, despite the shortsighted view of some who based their conclusions on the consumer use of RSS.

This morning Attensa CEO, Charlie Davidson, dropped me a line to let me know about new release of their StreamServer - it features:

Enterprise-based aggregation hub
Attensa StreamServer brings together information and content from inside and outside the enterprise. From this central location, information is organized into the specific topics important to the organization and effectively matched to the specific people that need awareness of those topics. Centralized aggregation provides many other benefits including the ability to search, recommend, comment, tag and share across all sources.

Enterprise-wide delivery options
Attensa StreamServer securely delivers the information people need in the places they work everyday ― on the web, in email, via their company intranet, in social business applications, and on their mobile devices. These fresh user experiences feature a personal information dashboard that makes staying aware of what matters efficient and more engaging.

Attention analytics
Attensa StreamServer breaks new ground with analytics based on how people are consuming and interacting with content. It leverages collective intelligence to make the entire delivery network smarter and more transparent via personalized recommendations, story ranking and comprehensive reporting.

We don't talk so much about Enterprise RSS specifically these days, but the Dachis Group has in fact been working away quietly building solutions that leverage the power of Attensa, such as the Reynolds Porter Chamberlain intranet.

Social business design is all about work, don't you know!

The problem is that Twitter fails miserably at actually providing a way to get the full picture of the conversations that I want to follow or participate in.

Everyday I see a several messages (either main posts or replies/retweets) that interest me, but each time I'm frustrated by the inability to see all the responses that make up the complete conversation. Imagine being at a party where a dozen people are standing in a circle discussing something. Now what if each person could only hear a fraction of what's being said?

...

I'd really like to be able to see all the responses to these questions. I think I'd both benefit from, as well as be able to contribute to each conversation.

Don't get me wrong, I love microblogging. I understand security concerns, privacy, trust, etc. I just highly prefer the parent/child threaded model where all responses to a post are visible under the main topic. For example, in Facebook I can read responses from everyone, even if I'm not friends with them.

Alan is right, it can take a lot of effort on the part of a user to pull together a complete discussion thread on Twitter. However, I'm not entirely convinced a threaded model would work for Twitter, beyond the most simplistic reply thread view in the Twitter Web interface.

Twitter works slightly differently from Facebook and most of the enterprise microblogging tools I've come across, which do support the threaded model. For example, baked-in support for likes, group and other filters. Still, Twitter is open enough that someone could create a threaded interface - and in fact many have tried. Other than the 140 character limit, this minimal structuring is probably a critical difference between Twitter and other tools.

I do also wonder if we are expecting too much from microblogging concept. Because of the structure they offer, I sometimes feel that non-Twitter microblogging tools turn into discussion forums that simply have a desktop widget and real-time notifications. When this happens, they lose the utility of microblogging. Rather than a criticism of the tools, I think this perhaps suggests that:

• There are times when we want a less transient discussion but lack access to an appropriate place to do it; and 
• The way we integrate and link social objects across different social media channels still isn't good enough.

BTW Alan - I found your post via good old RSS.

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?