What makes Socialtext’s Signals exciting to me
Socialtext delivered version 3.0 of their software today, and announced Signals, which will be part of their 3.5 release. Signals is a micro messaging service that goes beyond copying and pasting Twitter behind the firewall, and the reason for much of my excitement.
In an increasingly crowded market, content management just isn’t that compelling anymore. I can grab any number of solutions that will allow me to create and manage my content. Vendors have been working on this problem since it was called knowledge management and even before that. CMS providers have made it really easy for me to publish and distribute content. Thanks everyone, I totally love it!
Today, I need help making sense of all of the content being created. I, like many others, am drowning in an ocean of content! What I need is less content and more context. If you know me, you know that I drank Marshall’s RSS kool-aid a while back and have been happily leveraging the tech to manage my own context and attention (he just shared some more of his magic at WordCamp too). Tools like Yahoo! Pipes, AideRSS, Netvibes, and more save my ass daily. But managing crazy RSS plumbing is getting to be a lot of work. I seriously need context automation.
Context automation from Mad Libs
Signals has me all excited because it helps me with context in a really innovative way. It has what they’re calling a MadLibs engine that sends automated updates in micro message format. Steve Gillmor describes it well:
This implicit stream of data can be augmented via the REST API and the ATOM Publishing Protocol to create new update types in the form of a “MadLib” syntax: [Bob] [edited] this [page] in this [workspace] or [Jane] [closed] this [Salesforce lead] successfully, and so on. Gadgets can be dragged and dropped onto the Dashboard to let users pay attention across multiple workspaces, enterprise systems, and Web services.
Pretty cool to not have to remember to send updates, huh? Nice to know you don’t need to rely on your teammates to remember to notify you, huh? Well, that’s just the beginning.
Micro Message Rules
With structured micro messaging comes rules that can automatically process updates. Socialtext hasn’t said they would develop this functionality, but since they have an API, someone could!
Maybe you don’t care about every time someone edits a document in your department, but you care a ton about a specific document. You could set rules to turn off notices on document editing, but keep notices from a specific document. If people were manually updating that info, there would be no way to filter the data without natural language processing tools that don’t yet exist.
Maybe you need to talk to someone, but they’re at lunch. You could create a rule to ping you when their status changes to available. Since it’s not manual like IM, the user doesn’t have to remember to update it.
Now, think about rule sets! A job description could have a corresponding rule set helps the person stay focused on the updates that help them do their job
Comments
Some good ideas… but overall (visually) their stuff is pretty ugly.
I’m sure as a designer for Jive, that must be your sentiment