Conversations Instead of Email

To initiate a conversation, you first have to sign up to the service or sign in with your Twitter credentials, which doesn't take more than a minute. On the website itself, Nurphy looks a bit like a cross between Twitter and an email client. After you have signed up, you can start a conversation with anybody who is on the service already or by email. Recipients who don't want to sign up for Nurphy can continue to reply to messages by email.

Conversations on Nurphy are shown in a Twitter-like timeline in reverse chronological order. Conversations can be public, private or by invitation only (though still visible to the public). Public threats - like Nurphy's own customer service site - look a bit like forums and Nurphy recommends that you post links to these public conversations on your social networking profiles so that you can have a 'real' conversation with your friends. Without threaded conversations, however, it can be hard keep track of conversations. Instead of using sub-threads like Yammer, Nurphy borrowed Twitter's @reply structure.

It is clear that Nurphy's designers paid a lot of attention to detail. If you ever registered for a Gravatar in the past, for example, it will automatically choose this picture as your profile image in Nurphy. The service also offers a nifty mobile website, which looks especially good on the iPhone.

Needs some Fine-Tuning

The service, however, also still needs a bit of fine-tuning. You can't edit messages once they have been posted - the only option is to delete the whole message. It can also take a few minutes before an emailed message actually appears in a conversation. There are also a few small design flaws that take a user out of the experience. When you add a message, the whole page reloads, for example, even though the system seems perfectly capable of adding incoming messages to the conversation without a reset.

It almost seems like Nurphy is trying to keep things too simple in its current iteration. While we understand that the company is trying to make it as easy as possible for new users to get started, it would be nice if you could set up a private Yammer-like network for your friends or colleagues, for example.

While Geni itself is a popular service, a lot of attention has lately gone to Yammer, a side project that grew out of the same company and which is a Twitter-like service geared towards enterprise users. It is not clear if any of the money raised in this latest round will go towards expanding Yammer.

Yammer's story is similar to Twitter's, in that both projects were originally nothing more than side projects. Twitter, however, turned out to be the more lucrative project for Odeo. According to the publically available data, Geni is still growing at a steady clip, however, while Yammer, following an impressive growth spurt after its launch, is in slow decline.

This growth makes sense given the rush of new users these companies must be experiencing. It's not just growing hype, either. The combination of collaboration, intelligence gathering and ease of use make micro-messaging or micro-blogging a compelling addition to millions of peoples' work and personal lives.

Mainstream Media Love

The huge audiences of old school media outfits are getting regular introductions to Twitter these days. CNN's Rick Sanchez frequently interacts with his thousands of Twitter friends while discussing current events on his show. Newsweek featured Twitter messages prominently on the front page of its website during election day. The Wall St. Journal says that Twitter is now mainstream. That's getting harder and harder to deny.

We wrote on Monday about the Toronto Globe and Mail's decision to move star technology reporter Mathew Ingram into an online community manager role, including being responsible for getting the newspaper better integrated with communities on Twitter.

It appears that Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, also the founder of paradigm shattering Blogger.com, now has another epochal hit on his hands. The company has received several rounds of venture funding and announced this week that it's getting ready to expand its staff again with more new hires.

It's Not Just Twitter

There's a whole slew of microblogging services to choose from. We wrote about a comparative survey of just the ones useful for business users, earlier this week. The market leader in that emerging field may be Yammer, who report that more than 10 thousand businesses have had Yammer networks set up for employees or co-workers. According to an update from LinkedIn, Yammer recently brought another senior staff member over from parent company Geni. Just like Twitter was an off-shot of startup Odeo, Geni may end up eclipsed by Yammer.

A different but related animal is open source microblogging service Laconi.ca. We wrote enthusiastically about this company the day it went live. It's hard to know how many Laconi.ca installs are up and running, but this tiny company just quadrupled its staff this week with its first three full time hires.

We'll be watching for more growth news from companies in this sector but all indications now are that this is a communication paradigm making a rapid ascent and there are business decisions being made that demonstrate that.

When I asked him about Yammer, Timothy positioned Socialcast as "more Friendfeed than Twitter". He means that Socialcast takes a wider scope and can connect to outside web feeds such as Delicious, RSS feeds, LinkedIn profiles - aggregating all of them and surfacing them to other employees.

That makes sense for enterprises. Data integration is usually a winning formula.

What About Basecamp?

Outside the Blogosphere, the one product that seems to breaking into enterprise mainstream - possibly in the "early majority" phase - is Basecamp. So we had to ask Socialcast: "how do you position yourself related to Basecamp?"

Timothy said he is a big admirer of 37 Signals and Basecamp (as many of us are), but that the difference is that Basecamp is project centric, whereas Socialcast is more ad hoc.

By adding categories and groups, you can make Socialcast "project like", but its core is simply unstructured messaging enabling serendipity.

Reducing Organizational Spam

This was a phrase Timothy used in connection with email. He did not claim it as a phrase he invented and Google does not show it in common use, but it resonated with my experience. What these new messaging tools enable is a more fine-grained subscribe/unsubscribe process.

Enterprises look at email, IM, blogging, microblogging as all messaging. As such they have to worry about things like Sarbanes Oxley (SOX) compliance and other control issues. You know, all those emails from bankers saying privately "this stock is worthless" while pumping it publicly to investors. To be in the enterprise space, you have to live and breath this control stuff. Socialcast understands it.

Deployment Model

Socialcast can be deployed in two ways:

a) SaaS
b) Behind a firewall appliance

This pragmatism is now common amongst winning SaaS vendors. They don't turn away clients who want it deployed in their own data centers, but the appliance avoids all the implementation and version control hassles.

Revenue Model

A simple, low cost subscription model is good enough for Zoho, 37 Signals and it also works for Socialcast. They give the first 5 users free, enabling pilot trials. But there is no fancy "free but then we hook you with a paid version" model (which enterprises tend to be suspicious about).

Business Basics

Socialcast is 3 years young, San Diego based, has 11 employees, has been profitable since their second quarter, and is growing 100% year on year. They raised a small convertible round with private investors in December 2007, after they were already profitable.

Big cheer to another Gritty Entrepreneur!

Enter Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt, Best Buy’s Senior Managers for Social Technology, and better known as the guys who built Blue Shirt Nation. Drupal-based Blue Shirt Nation went on to become the prime internal enterprise 2.0 case study in Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell. Now they’re about to launch Mix, an enterprise microsharing application.

This is a guest post by Laura "@Pistachio" Fitton, Founder and Principal of Pistachio Consulting.

Gary and Steve took time recently to tell me more about Mix, HeadMix (the application it’s built with) and their plans for a “mobile Blue Shirt Nation.”

LF: Until a few weeks ago, there weren’t many publicly announced applications that could do something like this. When did you start looking for a provider to build an internal “Twitter” for Best Buy?

BB: We started talking to Headmix in March or April of 2008.

LF: You’d personally just started on Twitter then, so how did you know what you were seeking?

BB: We’re both social bookmarking junkies because sharing links is such a fast, easy way to share ideas. You just smack somebody with a URL. So we wanted something like that for Blue Shirt Nation. Something that combined mobile access with simple link sharing.

We also knew that for Blue Shirt Nation, the adoption rate drops off fast as you climb the hierarchy. Executives just don’t spend a lot of time using their browsers. Mostly, they’re attached to smartphones and Outlook, with some General Managers texting. So other than the short formats, the idea of a device agnostic network was appealing.

The other group of employees we want to reach better are General Managers in the stores. They don’t have a lot of time, but they might be able to fire off an update while they’re walking from the front of the store to the back. Again, looking at Blue Shirt Nation, the majority of use (by retail staff) is during breaks and before or after work. So for this group also, we wanted something with mobile access.

LF: How closely will Mix integrate with Blue Shirt Nation?

BB: We looked at a deeper integration and ended up with something simpler. It will look like BSN, and the applications will keep each other informed, but Mix will function like the mobile arm of BSN.

LF: What’s the time frame for rollout?

BB: It’s coming very soon. One big hurdle has been waiting for carriers to give us the short codes. That was long wait. There’s also been a lot of technical work on integration and authentication. By mid-to-end October we’ll have it live within one territory (out of 8).

LF: How do you plan to manage the rollout?

BB: Within that territory, we’ll focus General Managers, store GMs, territory managers, district managers — about 200 people. Really, we’re still wrestling with the rollout plan. Some mix of internal communications, Blue Shirt Nation, territory meetings, enterprise events and email.

LF: Do you think it will be easier or harder than rolling out Blue Shirt Nation?

BB: Harder actually, because there are more choices now of where (employees) can go to communicate online in general.

LF: What do you think of Yammer?

BB: We’ve seen some activity on it. A lot of excitement and conversation at the beginning, but then it tapered off. People didn’t want to maintain their Twitter and their Yammer accounts.

Also, we see a problem with Yammer. There are what, 160,000 employees at Best Buy? It’s like a few of you are thrown into a dark room together. You don’t really know who anyone is or who to trust. You’re told it’s okay, they’re all employees, go ahead, talk. But trust is an issue. Who are these people? How do we know them? What can we say?

LF: What factored into the decision to build out Mix using Headmix?

BB: We liked that it’s simple, but had the extra features when you wanted them. It sounds goofy, but we really liked the Outlook plugin — that’s where our employees live. That will make it easier to use. We really enjoyed getting to know the developer team and we’ve liked how flexible the application has been for moving data around and having different features.

We wanted to be able to make changes really fast, and had usually gone with open-source systems for other projects. But in the last 4 months the UI, features and data structure have been very flexible.

LF: What’s Headmix itself built on?

BB: Ruby on Rails. Ben Moore is a friend-of-a-friend met via a Ruby users meeting.

LF: What else can you tell us about Headmix?

BB: It’s a different but familiar feature set to Twitter — a few more places that you can click. We don’t have it set up to talk to Twitter but it could be integrated. There will be something like groups - channels, to use Headmix’ term, that act like containers for discussion. It’s behind a lot of security and encryption but it’s still an SaaS model. Location won’t be in the initial rollout, but might be in the future.

LF: What has been the corporate perspective on doing this at Best Buy? Was it a hard sell?

BB: Headmix has some good demo videos and was cool about explaining basically what it does — “here’s the cool use cases we see, etc.” We were able to talk about use cases and they were willing to adjust. Potentially this is just the advantage of working with a startup.

The initial assumption was that it would be hosted within Best Buy. But as is the case with a lot of enterprise systems, we had to look at whether we could really support and host it in-house, more politically than technically.

So many companies miss “Just Try It.” Nobody wants to just go ahead.

That said, we’re in a unique situation with BSN Labs — we essentially have a license to try pilots and see whats going to take off. So the conversation was, us: “We’re going to have a mobile version of Blue Shirt Nation.” Management: “oh, cool.”

People have stopped asking us about metrics, measurement and goals. They see that it’s a cost of doing business. Nobody questions whether you need to have phones anymore, its assumed.

LF: Nice position to be in.

BB: Whatever happens, it’s going to be cool to try it. We’ll learn something. Sometimes, the bigger things get the more fear it will fail.

I expect to see blowback on a lot of this stuff by next March. “I don’t need all this stuff.” People are going to start stepping back some. Enterprises are getting hammered so hard right now to try all this stuff. There will be some cutting back in what they can do, depending on what’s working.

LF: Thanks guys. We look forward to hearing more.

More about HeadMix from Pistachio Consulting's Enterprise Microsharing Tools survey:

HeadMix Inc.’s mission is to help employees collaborate and work more effectively by discovering knowledge that trapped inside their colleagues heads. It’s a lightweight, on-demand, easy-to-use messaging platform that promotes intuitive knowledge-sharing inside the enterprise via the web, email, mobile and SMS.

With HeadMix, users subscribe to other employees and/or relevant groups/topics allowing them to stay connected with the content that is most relevant. Questions get answered sooner; key conversations can weave into the workday; and news travels faster. HeadMix connects employees and makes them more valuable to other employees and their customers.

Features:

• Deploy inside firewall? No.
• Most of Twitter’s functions? Most.
• Groups, Location and a Desktop Client? Yes.
• Integrates with Twitter? No.
• Size of largest company? 150,000
• SMS? Yes.
• IM? Future.
• Built on: Ruby on Rails.
• Links and media sharing? All types.
• API? Yes.
• Largest trial group? 20,000.
• Price/user/month: based on active users only.
• Twitter-compatible API? Yes.
• Smartphone applications? Future.

Other notes:

• Fully integrates into enterprise daily existing workflow
• Ability to integrate custom applications
• Make customers’ existing apps more valuable by adding a social layer around them via email (Outlook), Sharepoint, etc.

Laura "@Pistachio" Fitton is Founder and Principal of Pistachio Consulting, and one of the first prominent "microbloggers." Her TouchBase Blog is a leading source of information about microsharing for business. You can find the original article there.

Banking 2.0: Money Management Moves to The Cloud

There was a time when managing finances from your computer meant you had to use desktop software. Today, that's no longer the case. There are now a number of applications that let you do your banking in the cloud, a trend we've dubbed "banking 2.0."

These sites aren't just simplified versions of our former desktop apps, either. Instead, they offer a number of features that take advantage of their "always on" status. Forget downloading updates and typing in your transactions line-by-line, these new banking 2.0 sites can offer you better insight into your financial situation with no additional effort on your part beyond just logging in.

Store, Tag and Print: 10 Great Photo Sharing Services

The photo sharing market is growing at a steady clip and new services are released regularly. In this round-up, we compare the features and usability of 10 of our favorite photo sharing sites. Two years ago, we published a similar list. So now seems a good time for us to revisit the topic.

Some of these sites focus more on mainstream users and photo-finishing, while others stand out because of their extensive social features. Note: we've included a full table of features for the services listed (see below).

Click here for the full-size version of this table.

Sometimes Google Isn't Enough: New Research Engine Searches "Deep Web"

What do you do when you need to research something on the web? You just google it, right? Using a web search engine like Google is usually fine for casual searches, but when you need to delve deep into a subject, it just won't do. What you really need is a research engine that explores the unindexed reaches of the Deep Web. For that, there's now Infovell, "the world's research engine."

Less than 0.2% of the web is indexed and some of the most valuable information lies beyond the search results returned from traditional engines. That's where a service like Infovell can help. This new subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) engine lets you explore content found on the Deep Web.

See also: Semantics + Google = SemantiFind

Finally: Joost Now Available on the Web

This week Joost announced that all of its content is now available directly on its website and not just through its desktop client. Joost was one of the most hyped-up companies on the web when the peer-to-peer streaming video service was still in stealth mode in 2006; and beta invites were rare and coveted. However, once users actually got a look at Joost, disillusion quickly set in. Joost's video quality was very high and it had signed up a wide range of content producers, but its downfall was its reliance on a desktop client. Users were already switching to viewing video on the web and having to start up a client just to watch video was simply too inconvenient.

RWW Predictions: Funding for Yammer

This week's prediction question focused on the winner of the TechCrunch50 event: Yammer. Yammer is a communications product that duplicates the functionality of Twitter, but with an enterprise twist. We certainly have our doubts about Yammer as an enterprise tool. However, we wanted to know your prediction for the financial future of Yammer. Will Yammer raise a round of funding in 2008 or 2009. If so, how much will they take? As at time of writing, here were the results:

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

Web Trends

Are You a Super Influencer?

A new report from Universal McCann discusses the rise of "a new breed of super influencers" that has been created by "the tools of the social media revolution." Before we all don our superhero capes, let's look more closely at the findings of the report.

Entitled When did we start trusting strangers? How the internet turned us all into influencers, the premise is that influence was moved beyond "professional and top down" (mainstream media) and into Web-enabled peer to peer influence. But despite McCann calling this a "democratisation of influence", all influencers are not equal. There are "super influencers" who are "extremely heavy users of social media, particularly in terms of content creation." Are you one of these people? Let's check out what the characteristics are...

Seven Social Media Consultants That Deliver Tangible Value

Is social media nothing but snake oil? Sometimes it can seem that way. As economies shift and trends emerge, would-be experts start popping up like weeds. Really good social media experts are a treasure - and they're not always easy to find.

In this post we highlight seven social media consultants that consistently bring tangible value to the table. These folks aren't full of hot air - they use their blogs to offer clear examples, links, tutorials and other resources you can put to use. If the goods you can see for free are so solid, that's all the more reason to investigate paying for these peoples' services. We hope this list will help you get smarter and maybe save a whole lot of money and anguish.

Tim Berners Lee Launches World Wide Web Foundation - Will it Be Effective?

Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, announced this week the formation of a new organization dedicated to studying how the web works and expanding access to the billions of people who can't get online today. The World Wide Web Foundation kicked off with $5 million in support from media funders the Knight Foundation.

Can yet another organization really make a difference? Some observers seem to be suffering from Organization Fatigue, but we're interested to see what Berners Lee can do. A group dedicated to deep study of the web and the obstacles to its growth sounds like a great idea to us. Not everyone agrees.

How Decoupled is The Innovation Economy From Rest of The Economy?

What a week of market mayhem! How odd having that as the backdrop to the Web 2.0 Expo in New York. We have been sounding alerts about the economic backdrop to our world of innovation for nearly a year. Back in February we wrote that this is not our bubble. Since then, the news from the economy has gotten worse and nobody is suggesting it will get better any time soon. Reading the papers is pretty grim (unless you stick to Sports or Arts). Yet we contend that it is not grim in the 'innovation economy'. Here's why...

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

RWW Enterprise Channel

Report: Nearly 70% of Businesses Allow Social Media Usage

A new report about Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 technologies, by Awareness, Inc., shows that employers are increasingly allowing staff to use social media applications in working hours. Awareness puts the figure at 69 percent of businesses in 2008, up from 37 percent last year.

It's the latest in a string of reports this year - from Awareness, Forrester and others - which provide data about the growth of web 2.0 in the enterprise. It'll be a $4.6 Billion industry by 2013, according to Forrester. See more of Awareness' findings in this post.

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

SEE MORE ENTERPRISE COVERAGE IN OUR ENTERPRISE CHANNEL

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Profits will usually follow if you have these three characteristics:

1. A valuable "must have" service
2. Delivered to a very large number of users who have money to spend
3. With rich customers (not necessarily the same as users in web ventures)

Parents a Key Audience

GoodGuide looks like it meets those three criteria pretty well. It looks a tad "trendy green" at first glance, but if you have young children you pay a lot of attention to what you put in and on those little bodies. As a parent, this is "mission critical". There are lots of parents out there and they spend a lot of money on what they consider their top priority. GoodGuide is not just for parents, but I think that will be their initial traction.

GoodGuide is going after a totally mainstream market; this service does not rely on the satiated early adopter that everybody else in Web 2.0 has been chasing.

Being in a hot area - "trendy green" - will help in getting mainstream press. I assume they will be worrying a lot more about PR in Vanity Fair and People than the tech blogosphere. So when they are ready, they have a shot at being noticed.

As for rich customers, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) is the classic advertiser. They spend tons. GoodGuide is not dependent on advertising from financial services firms that are in a mess at the moment.

Database of Intentions

GoodGuide did not reveal specifics on their revenue model. That is not a concern. GoodGuide is naturally monetizable, as the service creates a database of intentions. They will need to be careful in the nuances of monetization and so should take their time to get this right. But unlike communication services - which do not have a native monetization model - anything that creates a database of intentions finds clients and revenues fairly easily.

As for longevity/sustainability/barriers, what GoodGuide has done takes real hard work. This is not a simple social media hack or a surface aggregation that you could do with a tool like Dapper. GoodGuide requires a fine balance of technology, research and domain expertise. If 10 wannabees set out to compete, they would take at least 6 months and probably a lot longer to get to a me too offering.

Finally, passion. These guys sounded like they had been working this for a while and were in it for the long haul. You need that to build a business when simple exits are less likely and businesses will need to manage through a slower growth in the global economy. You need that passion to be thinking a couple of moves ahead, so you have plenty of innovation to counter the inevitable copy cat attempts.

Number 2 Pick

My number two pick would have been TrueCar - and it has similar characteristics. In the end, GoodGuide looks a better bet for one simple reason. We buy a new car only every few years, whereas we buy the products that GoodGuide researches every day. Marketing a brand/service that consumers only need occasionally is tougher, although search engine marketing has certainly made it a lot easier than it used to be.

What do You Think?

Tell us in the Poll what you think. Who should have won? Yammer or GoodGuide or another startup? If you choose 'other', tell us in comments who you think should have won and why.

Will Yammer raise a round of funding in 2008 or 2009. If so, how much will they take? Head to the ReadWriteWeb Predictions site to cast your vote or try out our new Predictions widget at the end of this article.

• Mint.com won TC40 last year and went on to raise $17 million in VC funding.
• Yammer applies a Twitter messaging system to internal corporate communications.
• Yammer is currently being praised by employees of the following companies and start-ups: Xerox, GetSatisfaction, Slideshare, and SmugMug.

In this post I outline the reasons why I do not consider Yammer to be a serious start-up.

Yammer totally failed that test. As I cast my eyes over the buffet, it was like "hmm, that looks like Crayfish and chillis over there, so I think I will pass on the plain pasta". When I saw that Yammer had won, I thought "I must have been mistaken, it is not plain pasta". So I looked at the site. "Hmmm, it still looks like plain pasta". So I thought "I must have missed the passion of the presenters and the nuggets of wisdom unearthed by the panel during Q&A". But having watched/listened to that, it still looks like plain pasta.

Not that there is anything wrong with plain pasta, it is quite nutritious and good for you if you need the carbs - and totally delicious if you are starving. But I was not starving. The buffet was groaning with delicious alternatives (more on that in another post).

Here is why I would not consider Yammer a serious start-up:

1. No barriers. Lots of alternatives already exist, some very credible. Even some open source. This looks like an engineer's side project. In engineer speak this is "trivial". I am sure there are dozens of clones already and many more being hatched right now.

2. The incumbent can replace their advantage way too easily. What stops Twitter adding some features to make it more appealing to enterprises? I imagine they are already considering this.

3. No natural early adopter. The normal early adopter is on Twitter. The early adopter within companies? If you are a good corporate citizen Yammer would look a bit career-threatening - for reasons explained below.

The reason Yammer was considered brilliant was that it had a "cunning revenue model". Let me see if I've got this right. You use Yammer rather than Twitter to restrict the Followers to your colleagues. So you can discuss company secrets really securely. (That, by the way, was a joke!) You use your corporate email ID (Gmail, Yahoo etc not allowed). All that is free, so massive viral adoption. Then companies want to claim/control the conversation. So they pay for all users on Yammer with a corporate email ID.

Yep that is cunning all right. Other words come to mind as well.

Whatever happened to building great software that gets massive adoption just because it is great software. Oh, 37 Signals has a lock on that?

Assuming Yammer gets traction, will enterprises meekly pay up?

Alternatively, will the CIO send an email saying: "Yammer is not allowed with our corporate email". Just to show that he/she is social media hip, the email could also say "you can use Twitter as much as you like". Maybe even deliver the message on Twitter.