Social Software Heating Up

This blog post by Ross Mayfield (founder of SocialText) seems to indicate Google is going to purchase Friendster. That wouldn’t surprise me, since Google has a vast amount of data and could apply social networking to it with little ease (especially given the incredible brain power they hire).

To me this marks the first real shot fired in the battle for social software. I work for Spoke Software that some might describe as “friendster for the business” (it’s a bit more than that, but in 4 words it’s not a horrible description). I expect to see an incredible amount of battles taking place in the next year on this front.

Interestingly enough, Ross Mayfield’s SocialText is one of the many companies looking to redefine the basic Wiki. Another of them is our very own Atlassian, founded by a cohort of mine, Mike Cannon-Brookes. Atlassian recently put out their first alpha of Confluence which aims to take the Wiki to the next level — or something like that.

Personally, I’m still waiting for the “groupware” that ties in ease of collaboration, bug tracking, and publishing (wiki/bugtracker/blog) in such a manner that is cohesive to your software engineering efforts. I think that a general social software product is nice and all, but development teams do things in a very specific way I’ve yet to see totally catered to in any product (yet, I’m holding my breath for Confluence).

I’m on Friendster, if anyone wants to be my friend. But I’d love to see more people from the blog community on Spoke. Unlike other social networking software, Spoke takes care of all the data input for you by taking a quick peek (don’t worry, it doesn’t take anything it doesn’t need) at your Outlook, Eudora, or Lotus emails and contacts. I developed Hotmail and POP3 support as well that should be live any day now.

Lastly, check out SpokePeople to see what who has been harvested in our network — you might be surprised!