Part of my morning routine in reading tech news and such is to pop by r/Portland, a massive subreddit that focuses on what’s happening in the Rose City. All couched in an appropriate amount of Reddit snark. Only today, the information I received wasn’t about Portland. Because the subreddit is inaccessible. For a reason.
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If you’ve spent any time on any social network or microblogging platform anywhere, you know as well as I do that there is one request that tends to crop up far more than any other: “I wish we could have groups.”
Twitter—thanks to a grassroots effort by Chris Messina—tends to handle that grouping with #hashtags. Local microblogging site CitySpeek made groups part of the process of posting your updates. Friendfeed handles it with groups. And Facebook—which incidentally owns Friendfeed now—does… well whatever it is that Facebook does. Fan pages maybe? I don’t know.
Point being, everyone starts with what I’m—or you’re—doing and then tries to wedge that content into a group. What if, instead, we started with the topic as the central focus? I mean, instead of the user. Well, now you can give that idea a try. With Simler. Read More
[HTML2]Former Oregon governor John Kitzhaber, who served two terms from 1995-2003, has decided to throw his hat into the ring for another gubernatorial bid. His Kitzhaber 2010 campaign launched this week.
And even though he hasn’t been out of the political dance that long, quite a few things have changed since his last bid—roughly a decade ago.
I mean, you might remember that Obama guy and his whole social media thing. Based on the initial rumblings from Kitzhaber camp, I can guarantee that the folks working on his campaign do. Read More
I know, I know. It seems like I’m falling into a bit of Jive fanboi-ism. But man oh man, if these folks aren’t rolling out one impressive announcement after another these days. And in a day and age where we continue to get doom and gloom about the economy and business prospects, these Jive announcements are like a little ray of sunshine.
Last week they were taking wing with Lufthansa and this week Jive announced that they had signed Toshiba’s sales team and resellers to power a new community designed to improve sales communications and collaboration called Toshiba eXCHANGE. Read More
[HTML2]Now, you may not realize this, but during my day job I’m constantly sifting through media reports. Gargantuan PDFs or documents that contain a series of clipped links and snippets about specific clients or subjects. The reports are unwieldy at best. And I can only imagine what kind of workload this effort creates for the agencies that compile them for me—and any number of other clients—on a daily basis.
Long story short, the whole “tracking media coverage” thing—whether for PR firms or otherwise—could use some help. And don’t even get me started on the whole social media angle.
But now, there may be hope. You see, Portland-based Iterasi might have an answer with their latest effort. Introducing PositivePress from Iterasi. Read More
[HTML2]Today, there are likely a bunch of folks in Portland who are wishing that the direct flight from PDX to Frankfurt was still available.
Why? Well, Portland-based Jive Software just announced that Lufthansa has chosen Jive’s Social Business Software to power a “company-wide networking initiative” designed to get Lufthansa employees sharing more information with their peers. Read More
Now, I realize that not everyone manages multiple social bookmark accounts. But I know some of you do. You’ve got two or three Delicious accounts. Maybe one for personal stuff and one for the blog. Or maybe you had to add another account when you resurrected your Ma.gnolia links. Whatever the case, managing those multiple accounts can get to be a bit of a headache.
And even if you don’t have multiple accounts, there are issues. Like having tons of bookmarks through which to search. Surely that could be made a tad easier?
Now, it can be. Thanks to Pukka, a Mac-based application built by Justin Miller of Portland-based Code Sorcery Workshop. Read More
No Portland-based startup stands a better chance of making a run at the fabled “Enterprise customer” than Jive Software, makers of Social Business Software that helps large companies do a better job of collaborating internally and with customers. Now they’ve partnered with SAP.
No Portland-based startup stands a better chance of making a run at the fabled “Enterprise customer” than Jive Software, makers of Social Business Software that helps large companies do a better job of collaborating internally and with customers. Recently, we’ve seen Jive fleshing out its exec team, opening a Palo Alto office, and signing a number of name brand customers.
Today, Jive continues the march toward the enterprise with the announcement of a partnership with business intelligence juggernaut, SAP. Read More
Portland-based Jive Software has been relatively quiet as of late. And that generally leads me to assume that they’re working on something new, but I didn’t really have much to go on as to what that might be.
Today, it all became much less clear. (Pun intended.)
Jive has announced that—for their newest release—they have abandoned the distinct Clearspace products in favor of launching a suite of tools entitled “Social Business Software.” And I’m sure it’s no accident that it just happens to be “version 3.0.”
Jive CEO Dave Hersh describes this new offering as the first new application category in business since CRM:
For our customers, SBS is the new enterprise category. The enterprise has been devoid of a new application category since CRM, and they see the advent of social software as the biggest change to happen to the enterprise in fifteen years. It’s now spanning every major vertical and the visionary leaders are seeing the gains that can be made by opening up collaboration and focusing on the people. This is especially true in a downturn, where throwing more money at business process software is not going to lead to huge value increases — you have to look to the areas where there is the most to gain, the white spaces in a company: the people.
Few companies have had the foresight of Jive to understand that—due to both external and internal forces—corporations would be dragged kicking and screaming into becoming much more social beings. This gives them an edge on insight, but they still have several goliath competitors with whom they compete, namely Microsoft and IBM.
Now, Jive is hoping to deliver the platform that helps enable this growing corporate predilection toward more social business management.
While there hasn’t been much from the enterprise-focused pubs yet, the tech blogs have taken a gander at Jive’s Social Business Software. Here’s what they had to say:
Jive’s Social Business Software makes collaboration easier (VentureBeat)
“With the downturn, you might assume that Jive was part of a fad that has passed…. But after talking to Chief Marketing Officer Lawrence, it sounds like that would be a mistake—Jive added 200 customers last year, bringing its total to more than 2,500, and many of those newer customers are paying for more expensive tools, so its revenue actually grew 70 percent. In fact, Lawrence says Jive is hiring. And a recent report from Forrester identified Jive and Telligent as the leaders in the ‘community platforms’ market.”
Jive Launches All-In-One Social Enterprise Software (TechCrunchIT)
“Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, the software combines computing with social collaboration. The Clearspace app helps businesses hold collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, and social networking features and more. The Clearspace Community app provides a platform that allows businesses to communicate effectively with customers and the broader community.”
Jive Rolls Out New Product, Takes on Microsoft and IBM in Social Business Software (xconomy)
“‘Enterprise software has been a boring category for 20 years, and Jive is here to change that,’ says Sam Lawrence, Jive’s chief marketing officer.
“You’d expect to hear something like that from an experienced marketer like Lawrence. Yet in this case, he is talking about a bold strategic move by a small company that has its sights set on becoming something like Facebook for the office, putting it on a competitive collision course with Microsoft, IBM, and a slew of startups that aim to help employees get better at collaborating. Jive has evolved to this point from its founding in 2001, before the days of social networking. Its early forays into social software involved online forums and instant messaging, and were focused on support— things like getting customers to help each other rather than call a company with time-consuming questions.”
Jive Updates Enterprise Social Networking (eWeek)
“IBM’s Lotus Connections, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other players are approaching enterprise social-networking, but Jive Software wants to take some market-share of its own with its Social Business Software (SBS) platform. Jive claims that its software’s collaboration and profile features could make it ‘Facebook for the enterprise.'”
Jive Goes Bigger (Than Ever) (ITSinsider)
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“I’m not sure you can announce your leadership in a category, but that’s what Jive has done with the announcement of its Social Business Software application suite—Jive SBS 3.0. The product does bring a deliberate focus to the logical organizational interests of a social enterprise– namely, Employee Engagement, Marketing & Sales, Customer Support, and Innovation. With that segmentation, along with an overhaul of its Jive Clearspace 2.5 released last summer, the software has been reborn—perhaps in the original image of its founders, according to Sam Lawrence, Chief Marketing Officer. With this new release, Jive is stridently targeting IBM and Microsoft customers with what could prove to be a superior solution.”
New Jive Offering: Clearspace becomes ‘SBS (ZDNet)
“From origins as a forums and instant messenger vendor, Jive launched ‘Clearspace‘, a single application with wikis, blog, discussions, instant messaging, rss, email integration and files into spaces organized by topic in 2006. This in turn morphed into internal (’Clearspace’) and external (’Clearspace Community’) focused versions.
Jive have now taken the industry segment phrase to rename Clearspace ‘Social Business Software’ (SBS), and are making a play as an enterprise class, company wide backbone for all facets of business collaboration.”
Jive unveils new social media business tools (Silicon Forest/The Oregonian)
“The concept is fascinating — Jive’s software uses a social networking interface to draw in and connect a company’s employees with one another, and with customers. At first blush it looks like Facebook, a format Jive hopes will help engage companies’ younger employees….
“Dave and the folks who started Jive, Bill Lynch and Matt Tucker, had lots of other thoughtful things to say about Jive’s outlook and Portland’s startup scene. I’ll have more on that, and more from them, in an upcoming article.”
Jive will be rolling out the new Social Business Software suite next week—but existing customer already have access. It will be interesting to see what kind of reception this latest iteration of Jive’s tools receives. Here’s hoping they get a positive response from both current customers and those potential customers waiting in the wings.
For more information on the latest release, visit Jive Social Business Software.
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[Full disclosure: Iterasi is a client of mine. I was aware of this feature under development, but I was not involved in this release. Quite frankly, it took me by surprise. But it makes sense that they’re pushing it while they’re down at the TechCrunch 50.]
Back when I discovered social bookmarking, the way I used the Web changed.
Okay. That may be a little hyperbolic, but there’s a lot of truth to that.
With social bookmarking, I was able to save site locations, tag them in a meaningful way, and get to them from any browser with an Internet connection.
It may not seem like a big deal now. But back then? It was “You mean my bookmarks aren’t beholden to this one browser on this one machine? Oh my. Very cool.”
But my bookmarks always suffered from a problem that I couldn’t solve with just a link.
And that was? Well, sometimes the page just changed. The story or the thing I thought was important or—worst of all—the cool design that I wanted to rip-off save for inspiration.
Screenshots were a workaround. But they were never really what I wanted.
What I wanted was to save the page.
Fast forward to today.
I’m sitting on a ton of bookmarks. I use social bookmarking sites like ma.gnolia and del.icio.us every day, if not several times a day. They have become so much a part of the way that I use the Web—and the way that I share and glean information from others—that social bookmarking would be an incredibly hard habit to break.
But I still worry about losing the page I actually wanted.
Well, now, that problem is solved thanks to still just barely Vancouver-based and ever-so-close to being Portland-based Iterasi and their new “import bookmarks” feature:
This feature imports bookmarks from Firefox, Internet Explorer, del.icio.us and/or from any app that exports to the standard bookmark export format. So you tell it where your bookmarks are, we import them and make permanent copies of the pages the bookmarks point to. No more lost articles. No more link rot. No more Error 404s. But we don’t just import them. Import Bookmarks is built on top of the iterasi Scheduler – released last month – so one-by-one you can choose to archive each bookmark once, every day, week or month, or not a all.
Now, granted, that’s not going to do much for the links that have already aged. But from now on? I can be sure that I’ll have exactly the page I wanted to save.
As excited as I am about this feature to extend the use of Iterasi, there’s one thing I’m even more excited about: not having to use Iterasi.
Huh? Stick with me here.
I’ve developed a workflow for saving links and—as chagrin as I am to admit it—Iterasi isn’t part of that workflow.
It’s an afterthought. A habit I’m trying to force.
But with this feature? That problem is solved, too.
How?
Now that Iterasi can import bookmarks, I can work in my preferred social bookmarking tool and still have Iterasi saving the pages for me.
I can fly around willy nilly tagging things in del.icio.us or saving them to the Silicon Florist group on ma.gnolia. All the while, knowing that I can bring those over to Iterasi to make an archived copy.
And that’s pretty cool.
I can work where I’m comfortable working without losing the ability to save things I really want to save. And that makes this new import bookmarks feature very powerful indeed.
The feature, however, does come with a caveat:
If you have lots of bookmarks, it is best to schedule it to run when you are away from your computer. Think about it; we are feeding dozens and dozens of bookmarks down to the browser who is one-at-a-time loading, notarizing, and shipping each up to your account. In other words, we are torturing the poor browser. As you might expect, the browser can lock up under this kind of load. We find this situation to be unavoidable.
For more information and a short video on the new feature, see the Iterasi blog. Want to test drive it yourself? Download the latest version of Iterasi and then click on the “leaves” to access the feature.
