GroupSwim is a great collaborative group-work offering. I've reviewed what they do previously over on ReadWriteWeb. In essence their offering aims to connect individuals and build knowledge utilising social based methodologies.

I spoke with GroupSwim VP of customer success Jason Rothbart the other day, and he ran me through their new release. Before covering the changes I thought I'd briefly recap the main parts of GroupSwim's offering.

GroupSwim extends the common functionalities of similar offerings in some novel, and most importantly very useful ways;

Semantic Approach

Content entered into a discussion, a wiki page or within a file is automatically analysed and tagged with keywords. This allows better classification, better searching and a more relevant and proactive customer experience to be offered to the user. Of course users can edit, change and add to the automatically generated tags but it speeds up the process no end.

Qualitative Differentiation

GroupSwim keeps a running tally on both explicit and implicit rating of material. Explicit rating comes from user ratings as per other solutions, implicit rating comes from a host of automatically assessed criteria - how often an item is read, how many times it is on-forwarded, how long it remains open etc. In this way users get a true assessment of the quality of any piece of content.

New features

The new release includes some important functions that a group-work offering like this needs;

Wikis - Wiki offerings are a dime a dozen, GroupSwim has spent lots of time ensuring theirs is user friendly - basic functions such as editing and table creation are quick and intuitive.

Newsfeed - GroupSwim realises that in these data intensive times, having one place to asses new information is very useful. They've borrowed from Facebook and have introduced a news feed where users can see new content from across all their different groups - this content can be displayed according to the user's preference - chronologically or separated by groups.

Summary

GroupSwim is a cool offering - it's great to see them embrace the aggregative approach where by users can have a nice easy view of all their information - no matter where it comes from. Their semantic approach and the automation of some standard functions should prove an efficiency boost for their customers. Check out their fresh new video below;

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Socialtext, the enterprise wiki company is no more… a wiki company, that is.  Not since Socialtext 3.0, the new release announced today.   Founder and Chairman Ross Mayfield calls his new baby a Connected Collaboration Platform, that’s modular, built on a widget framework, and consists of:

• Socialtext Dashboard – your Communication Central
• Socialtext People – Facebook for the Enterprise
• Socialtext Workspace – originally known as the wiki

A fourth piece, Socialtext Signals is in the works, in private beta testing – I guess we could call it Twitter (Yammer?  ESME?) for the Enterprise.  Actually more, since it involves active microblogging – quick messages – as well as pulling in what users do elsewhere (FriendFeed?)

The platform is flexible, easy to customize via widgets, clearly the vision is that in an enterprise environment actionable information is pulled in from the transactional systems, too – i.e. ERP, CRM.

Knowing Ross as the uber-social guy something tells me this is what he always wanted to to: create Social Software.  But I tend to agree with Jevon MacDonald, who differentiates social software from the wiki, which is primarily a collaboration tool.  So Ross was really in the collaboration business and given his name became synonymous with wiki evangelism, he will no doubt have a hard time changing that image.

This is not to say the wiki part, should be neglected… It is the primary collaboration facility for anything not well handled by process-driven, transactional systems, and all this social layer is just the glue that holds it all together.  (Hint: you will hear a lot more about Glue soon).

I had in the past been quite critical of Socialtext’s wiki component, and am looking forward to revisit it, as part of our wiki-series in the coming weeks @ CloudAve.  In the meantime, enjoy this video:

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Yet-another-email-is-dead article, this time on SocialMediaToday, originally on OnlineMarketerBlog.  The author adds  Microblogging's increasing popularity to the  standard "reusable" arguments: people  using IM, or increasingly SMS, and most recently Facebook instead of email which they find cumbersome, slow and unreliable - hence email usage will decline.

I beg to disagree as I did before and before and before.  Sure, I also get frustrated by the occasional rapid-fire exchange of one-line emails when by the 15th round we both realize the conversation should have started on IM. Most of teenagers' interaction is social, immediate, and SMS works perfectly well in those situations. However, we all enter business, get a job..etc sooner or later, like it or not...

Our communication style changes along with that - often requiring a build-up of logical structure, sequence, or simply a written record of facts, and email is vital for this type of communication.  As much fun Twitter may be, I rarely have (or see) serious ongoing discussions there  - in other words Tweets are in addition, instead of email.

Email in business is being "attacked" from another direction though: for project teams, planning activity, collaboratively designing a document, staging an event... etc email is a real wasteful medium. Or should I say, it's the perfect place for information to get buried. This type of communication is most effective using a wiki, or an increasing number of online tools supporting native collaboration.  Recently I reviewed a startup CEO's ppt deck, and it took us 4 rounds of emailed versions of the same presentation - it would have been a lot easier to collaborate on just one "master" presentation online. So yes, I agree, even in business we're offloading stuff off email. 

But email is far from dead, or even in danger, and it won't be any time soon. We just have to learn to use the right tool in the right situation. As usual, Rod Boothby says it better in a single chart:

Rod's chart is two years old, but still valid - perhaps I would update it to say "Wiki and collaborative documents".  My own post here is a slightly updated version of an older one from July, which is an updated version of the one from  last year, which in turn was an almost verbatim reprint of another one from July 2006. I rarely re-post old stuff, but in this case I felt it still made a valid point.  Next year, when someone brings up the "is email dead?" question, I'll dust it off again.