As far as Ross Mayfield is concerned, e-mail in the workplace is a disaster: “It’s being used for more than it was intended for. With cc’s, we’ve stretched a point-to-point medium into a broadcast medium.” Of course, he would think so. As CEO of Socialtext, a three-year-old software company, he has an alternative. Mayfield met with me recently for lunch in San Francisco to talk about how Socialtext’s wiki applications give businesses a new way for their employees to communicate.
You probably know something about wikis because of Wikipedia, the astonishingly successful open-source encyclopedia, which is rapidly becoming its own alternate Internet. If you aren’t acquainted with it, go right now to Wikipedia.org, look up anything you care about, and prepare to be amazed. “Why will we ever again need any other form of reference?” you may wonder. Wikipedia is created by readers. Anyone, even you, can alter any entry. Despite that, it is a reliable, accurate source on almost everything. If someone contributes erroneous information— intentionally or unintentionally, a devoted group of volunteers monitor and correct it—usually in minutes.
Socialtext is one of several companies bringing the same concept to corporate communications. Its software gives employees tools to create shared conversations and collective dialogues without using e-mail. One of Socialtext’s rivals includes another cool company, Jotspot, founded by Joe Kraus and Graham Spencer, who were among the creators of Excite, the breakthrough search engine launched in the mid-90s.
Plenty of other products aim to facilitate group communication, notably Microsoft’s SharePoint, which is working to add blogs and wikis. Because of Microsoft’s formidable market share in corporate software, Mayfield sees SharePoint as Socialtext’s main competitor. Other players in related businesses include IBM’s Lotus Notes, Microsoft’s recently-acquired Groove, and Intuit’s QuickBase. At this point, commercial wikis, such as Socialtext’s and Jotspot’s, have a tiny fraction of the corporate market compared to more established players, but I believe the simplicity of the wiki could ultimately prevail.
“We’re doing social computing,” says Mayfield. “It’s something that Microsoft Office was never meant to do. Office is all about creating a finished product—a brilliant PowerPoint or another document that someone does in isolation. Meanwhile, enterprise software chains people to top-down processes with rigid business rules. And the glue that’s been holding it all together has been e-mail.”
Mayfield, now 35, and three co-founders launched Socialtext in 2002 with $5,000. Working from home for the first year, they hosted the company’s entire business on a used $400 eMachines PC. This year the company grew up, bringing its total capitalization to $4.6 million. In August, it opened its first office in Palo Alto, Calif., but 16 of its 20 employees still work from home. (They communicate using wikis and blogs, of course.) Investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a white-hot Silicon Valley venture-capital firm, enterprise software giant SAP, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Joi Ito, a Japanese venture capitalist. Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, joined the board in October.
Socialtext claims that 10 FORTUNE 500 companies are among its 50 customers, which include the BBC, Nokia, and the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. At Dresdner a good portion of the company’s entire Intranet—for about 7,000 employees—is now being turned into wiki format. Employees can even alter information posted on a wiki by the human resources department. Mayfield, a passionate believer in the bottom-up ethic of the Internet, says that Socialtext won’t restrict the ability to edit wikis to certain employees, even though that would be easy to do. He wants to stay true to the wiki spirit of collaboration and trust. So far, at least, it’s been working. “In three years we haven’t seen one single case of someone deliberately damaging corporate a wiki,” he brags.
Wikis can either be permanent or set up for a short project. Content can be posted to a wiki in several ways, including by e-mail. A wiki can also generate e-mail, but only if you ask it to. You can set up the wiki to alert you, for example, if your boss posts something new, so you won't have to receive every last announcement about a lost notebooks in your e-mail inbox. “E-mail is pushed to you,” says Mayfield. “You have no control over what goes into it. But a wiki uses a ‘pull’ model of attention management.”
“If you let go of a little bit of control you get back participation and innovation,” Mayfield insists. And, of course, his example is Wikipedia. It was originally called Nupedia, a for-profit attempt to develop an online encyclopedia written by experts. Only when Wales and his team gave full control over to readers did it begin to flourish and grow rapidly. At the end of October, there were Wikipedia versions in well over 100 different languages with a total of 2.5 million articles. The English language edition alone includes 825,000 articles.
Businesses can also use free wikis. More than two million copies of open-source wikis (which generally have fewer features than Socialtext’s software) have been downloaded from the open-source website SourceForge.net. Mayfield himself intends to make a full-featured, free open-source version of Socialtext’s wiki available by April. Once companies decide the service is essential, he hopes Socialtext can charge them for hosting it.
Given how overtaxed we all feel at work, it’s inevitable we will need new, more efficient ways to work together and collaborate. E-mail won’t go away, but tools like the ones Socialtext offers prove that there are other—sometimes more efficient—ways to get work done. (And if you disagree, I’m sure you won’t hesitate to e-mail me about it.)
Questions? Comments? E-mail them to me at dkirkpatrick@fortunemail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment