ReadWriteWeb

One of the unexpected perks of starting work at ReadWriteWeb in December? No more Yammer.

This, of course, is more of a company culture problem than anything Yammer can control. Yammer continues to grow, and the enterprise social network space is where companies who are conceding truly social networking dominance to Facebook, Google+ and Twitter, will seek to grow.

We written frequently about corporate microblogging tool Yammer and today they have made the digital equivalent of the Louisiana Purchase. This is a major land-grab for the company and an example of how wide they can extend their service into a variety of other nooks and crannies of our online lives. The announcement concerns six new partners and three new features.

If you are trying to keep track of your competitors, you have a variety of tools that can make your search for business news easier. At the low end (meaning free) is Google Alerts and Google News, and you can build your own RSS feed collection and examine what comes through that pipeline. There are also paid gathering tools from Hoovers, Lexus and InsideView.com, just to name a couple of examples. GageIn is trying to enter this market with the release of its Content Platform and the integration with Salesforce and LinkedIn data repositories.

Both Podio and Mzinga have announced major updates to their enterprise collaboration and social streaming services this week. While they operate at different price points, this is yet another indication of product maturity in this space.

First is Podio, whom we included as one of our 2011 startups to watch from last December. New this week is what they call Employee Network where everyone from the same company will automatically be joined, and only those with a verified domain email address can get access. This gets around the startup effort to promulgate Podio across the company. They also made changes to their pricing model too.

A video interview of Deloitte Australia's CEO Giam Swiegers goes into some interesting details about how the audit and consulting firm is using Yammer's tool. While the interviewer Leon Gettler clearly was not familiar with the social networking service, Swiegers provides lots of insights in how half of his 5,000 staffers are connecting on up to 150 conversations daily.

Sheldon Laube has been around tech for decades, holding executive positions at leading consulting firms and working most notably at Price Waterhouse Coopers these last few years as chief innovation officer. I caught up with him this week and recorded a short podcast interview that you listen to here.

I spoke with him about his thoughts about collaboration and social media and how things have changed over the decades with these tools.

Today Socialcast has announced the beta of Strides, its first big launch since VMware acquired them earlier this summer. Just connecting everyone on an internal social network isn't enough - everyone has to actually use the network for their work activities. And Strides is bringing a lightweight Web 2.0 form of project management, layering it on top of the social networking tool.

Intuit today announced Brainstorm, a new Web-based collaboration and idea-sharing tool. It works by connecting employees through a simple program that inspires users to interact and collaborate with each other, enabling increased innovation opportunities and bringing a social mindset to businesses.

Inmagic is launching an idea management system called IdeaNet this week, claiming to deliver the "right mix of culture, process, and tools to support open and fluid lines of communication across organizational communities and silos." That's quite a mouthful, not to mention a lot of Big Ideas right there.

What is part Nimble.com, part Constant Contact, part Web site authoring tool, part SurveyMonkey, part wiki all rolled into one? The answer is a new service called GreenRope, available now.

This is a Swiss Army Knife of the Web. There are more tools here than you can possibly review in a short article, and the idea is to put in one place everything you need to get started online.