As you might have guessed from the topics of conversation, I’ve been working on a start-up in the social software space. There’s a tremendous amount of innovation in the public internet, using tools like weblogs and wikis. We’re bringing these to corporations behind the firewall.
The pattern of adoption feels like the early PC era — champions discover a new set of simple tools bring them to the workplace, under the radar of central IT and corporate purchasing.
The first version of the SocialText website is here.
The team is fantastic — some folks I’ve admired for years — smart, competent, experienced, nice people. The group is distributed — Ross and Pete in the Bay Area, Ed in Ann Arbor, and sometimes Greg in NY.
We stay in touch by phone, email, and IM, and collaborate largely by wiki, which is egregiously fun. It feels like improvising together on a whiteboard, except you’re not in the same place at the same time, you have a document draft when you’re done, and you’re building a knowledgebase as you go.
If you have any questions, feel free to send me an email (contact info in sidebar at right), and I’ll be happy to tell you more about it.