Socialcast

Socialcast is always open to user feedback, and this week, many of the features we have released are in response to requests by users to improve their Socialcast experience. If you have feedback, questions, or ideas, follow us on Twitter for a quick response to your thoughts.

What You Requested:

Tag Cloud: Socialcast has released a tag cloud for each community. Tags are highly important as they indicate trends in user-generated content, giving real-time insight into the pulse of the community. The top 100 tags in each network will be available and weighted with five tiers of use. Access the tag cloud as a drop down menu under the “Share” box.  Clicking on a tag filters your stream to include all of the posts including that tag. You can use the tag filter in combination with the message type and category filters, allowing you to create a robust, personalized search.

Invite New Members to a Group and the Network: Several users reported that they wanted to invite fellow employees to specific groups, but when those employees weren’t members of the overall network, this couldn’t happen. We’ve made it possible for you to now invite a person who isn’t a member of the network into a group and the network in one quick form. Your colleague will receive an activation email to join the network as well as your group.

Hide Private Groups: Private Groups are now only visible to the members of the Group and are no longer listed in the Groups directory. This has been a highly sought-after feature, allowing truly private conversations about the business to happen discreetly with appropriate members only.

Delete Groups: Group creators can now delete an entire group, removing all messages and the avatar from the Group directory.

API: Last week, we released our Socialcast API. The Socialcast API includes a robust set of operations to interact with your company’s messages. We encourage developer feedback and questions. If you have any questions or suggestions, please visit our API developer support group or contact us at support@socialcast.com

If you have started developing any clients on our API, let us know – we’d love to hear from you!

The Socialcast office has been abuzz with lots of new feature development this week. Both of our recent major updates began with a dialogue about customer needs several months ago. We’re pleased to have been able to understand the business challenges our customers faced to be able to create Socialcast features that would help alleviate them.

What’s New

Broadcast Message Feature: As we announced last week, this new feature allows company leadership to send time-sensitive and critical information to the community immediately. Broadcast Messages appear highlighted in the live stream and are accompanied by an email alert with the URL to send members directly to the message.

According to Marcia Connor and Bill Ives from Pistachio Consulting, “This feature can provide a greater sense of community within the enterprise as all levels of the organization can now respond to breaking broadcasted news through a channel that provides greater collaboration than email.” Read their full blog post about this feature’s implications for enterprise microblogging here.

What You Requested

List View:  We recognize that some messages can dominate a stream’s real estate with comments. Therefore, this new viewing option condenses the information if desired, allowing you to grab a high level overview of conversations without all of the comments. More details can be found on our blog post about this view.

Did You Know:

Did you know that the on-demand version of Socialcast is completely free to use and administer for unlimited users? Other vendors are charging $3 per user, per month for features such as exporting your messages, adding non-employees to the network, and creating a custom usage policy. These are free services with Socialcast. Try us out and see what you think!

As a new member of the engineering staff, I was eager to start contributing to the application and learning about my coworkers. The Socialcast team includes employees in Irvine, CA, San Diego, CA, and Minneapolis, MN. The team uses its own product to stay in touch, and despite the distance, team members generally know what everyone is working on. I was invited to the employee community and started reading right away. When away from my desk or traveling, the iPhone web application helps me stay connected to what is going on. Several team members share their Twitter statuses or Flickr photos with Socialcast, some use the Gmail Gadget, and some use the bookmarklet. Frequent communication from within the application or through users’ Web Feeds helps keep the whole team synchronized.

At previous companies I’ve worked for, interacting with remote team members was generally limited to email. It is difficult to learn about someone’s personality through email, and there usually is no rhythm of sharing. Email messages are specific and generally sent from one individual to another. Email has more problems, messages get lost, buried in inboxes, or importance can be misunderstood. In the Socialcast employee community, team members establish their interests by sharing things and interacting with the things others share. Shared items are available to everyone and searchable. At one company I worked for, new employees were greeted with an Inbox loaded with emails. Some were from managers, some were for meetings that already happened, announcements, social events—it was difficult to start contributing. If employees didn’t delete these immediately (some did), the messages were soon buried by newer ones (but not necessarily more important ones). In Socialcast, old messages get moved to the top of everyone’s Activity Stream when they are interacted with. This helps ensure team members are seeing relevant information in a timely fashion.

Socialcast provides a way for employees to hear and to be heard. By reading updates, I know which coworkers can help me out, whether it be for search engine tuning, or for brewing my own beer! I’m enjoying learning about and sharing things with my coworkers. I’d love to hear about your experience with Socialcast, and how we can make it even better!

It’s cold and rainy today in Irvine, but that didn’t stop the dedicated Socialcast team from celebrating a once in a lifetime event – 1234567890.

As I write this post, we’re all enjoying some chocolate goodness to commemorate Sequential Epoch Time – exactly 1234567890 seconds from the birth of Unix on January 1, 1970. It was a brief celebration – one second, to be exact - but the anticipation for the event lasted all day.

Thanks to Sean for bringing in the customized cake, and for keeping us informed of how much more time we had until we could cut it. And, thanks to the grocery store cake girl who, without question, wrote out 1234567890 in perfectly neat little red numbers.

On a side note, it’s ironic that none of the Socialcast team members were even around in 1970…

We’re always interested in what users have to say.  Unfortunately, we haven’t had a very straightforward way for users to give us feedback…until TODAY!  We’ve now added a convenient feedback link to the footer of every page.

You’re now just seconds away from sending your feedback our way and we want to hear it all.  What do you like best about Socialcast?  What features would you like to see?  Do you have a question or see something that looks broken?  Let us know.

We’ll be actively monitoring and responding to any feedback we receive, so consider this an open invitation to let your voice be heard.

One of the most common questions we get asked here at Socialcast is, “When are you going to release a Desktop version of your application?”

Well, the truth is that we built a web application and that, by its very definition, means that it is designed and engineered to be accessed through a browser. Most web 2.0 applications these days leverage the power of the modern browser (Firefox, IE7, Safari, Opera) and the ability to be accessed anywhere at any time.   

From the Browser to the Desktop–A Simple Solution

Single Site Browsers.

“What’s a Single Site Browser (SSB) anyway?”, you ask?

SSB’s are all about simplicity and convenience. Nowadays most users have multiple tabs open in their browser and flip back and forth. With a SSB you can set up any web application to behave like a desktop application. Each one has its own window, can be easily minimized, complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, etc. Best of all, you get clear separation from your other web browsing activity. 

Awesome! Now how do I create my first SSB?

You can download Mozilla’s Prism for Windows, Mac (OS X) and Linux.  

For Mac (OS X) users, you can also use Fluid (we use it all the time), which is based on the Safari browser .

Windows users can also try Bubbles, another SSB creator for Windows only.   

Once you have downloaded the SSB creator of your choice the process is quite simple: 

1. Launch the application.

2. Fill in the details. 

Note: In the Icon drop-down menu, the second option is to specify an icon of your choosing. Now, if you fancy nice big, clear Application icons, you can find many of your favorite websites and their icons in this Flickr Group. And if you would like to use the Socialcast icon, grab it right here. 

3. Click the “Create” button and violá, you have a desktop version of your favorite web application. 

4. Repeat. (If so desired for other web apps).  

And that’s it! We hope this helps expose the power and benefits of using SSB’s in your everyday work life.

The development of our Socialcast software over the past two years has given us a living, breathing application that’s evolving on a daily basis. As we’ve molded the system to fit our vision, we’ve constantly tried to focus on integrating other web feeds, services, and software that you already use.  We believe that employees have a lot to offer their companies via these outside services. Therefore, we’re pleased to announce the launch of three new services and applications that allow you to work smarter and share information more easily via email, while browsing the web, or from your instant messaging platform.

Update Your Status with Jabber (beta)

Send IM messages to the Jabber Socialcast bot to update your Status or Worklog within your community. Many employees stay logged into Jabber all day, but they don’t do the same with a web browser. This Jabber integration lets you keep your working habits the same while enabling rapid information sharing with a quick IM message. 

The Socialcast Gmail Plugin (beta)

Create a real-time sidebar display of your community’s activity directly inside your Gmail inbox by installing the Gmail plugin for Firefox. You’re going to be checking your emails at some point, but that shouldn’t prevent you from staying on top of new information inside your community. This plugin lets you view and rapidly respond to information without having to abandon those 42 unread messages.

The Socialcast Bookmarklet

This is an old tool that’s made a comeback recently. The Socialcast Bookmarklet makes it easy to share links and update your status from your Favorites tab. Again, we know you simply can’t always be logged into your community, so this provides a quick way to share information with your team at the moment you discover a useful link.

There are definitely more features coming soon, including an Outlook plugin that is on its way. If you have any other ideas for new features, please let us know. And, anyone who is going to Defrag this week – I’d love to meet you, so please feel free to track me down introduce yourself!

It is with great pleasure that I welcome the newest member to our Socialcast Feature Family - file attachments. Now, when you share a new status message, question, or idea, you can attach a supporting file that emphasizes your point. Why is this important? Well, we think that providing evidence and documentation to support a question or idea makes all the difference in the workplace. And, instead of simply accessing information somewhere on your Share drive or via your intranet, you can find and share information now within a specific context. You’ll know where a document came from, why it was developed, and who was responsible for its creation.

An old Marketing guru once told me, “In God I trust - everyone else, bring data.” Now you can use Socialcast to share that data with your colleagues, whether it be artwork mockups, accounting spreadsheets, presentations, or marketing copy.

We believe that email can suck the productivity out of business. We believe that every employee can and should make meaningful contributions to your company. We believe that enterprise communication is fundamentally broken. That’s what we’re here to fix.

Today we’re launching the most important, exciting and fundamentally powerful upgrade to our enterprise software that addresses these challenges. We’ve deployed our new Enterprise Social Messaging system that allows teams, entire companies, departments, and workgroups to organize, shape and share information more effectively. Some have called it a “Twitter for the Enterprise,” and we think that’s a pretty great analogy.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out our software to companies big and small. Check back frequently for updates, news, and more – and we invite you to sign up and try out Socialcast for free for 30 days. We are excited to get your feedback so we can continue to develop Socialcast into a tool that helps solve your communication and knowledge sharing challenges.