Why in the world are we paying for Social Text? « DC’s Blog
Why in the world are we paying for Social Text? « DC’s Blog
There’s a good string of comments here. Mine is as follows:
I both agree and disagree with Alan here. Disagree in the sense that I think some “free” sites are competition – namely, Google. Many companies have precisely moved away from enterprise level email hosting, and routing their corporate email through Gmail. I think there is a real danger here that Google sites (Google’s free wiki platform) could morph into a similar competitor.
On the other hand, my experience with SocialText is that they tend to be fairly proactive in platform development. Just as I wish that ST had a feature, it’s not long before it appears (of course, I’ve been asking for the ability to “rate” pages for years now to no avail). I also agree that ST is a very “user friendly” experience. They do a good job at hand-holding, which is required for the short term adoption of these tools. If ST continues to hand hold and use those opportunities to respond to customer concerns by adding new features, then they could stay one step ahead of the Googles of the world.
It might never become a $50B company, but by pushing the envelope on group collaboration they can might find a good niche that they can ride for many years. We’ll see.
What they really need to do is hire me as a consultant to go into companies and give my dog and pony show on group collaboration. Maybe if they reach their first billion.
I’ve brought up the rating discussion again internally. There are some issues that need to be considered. Unlike static web pages, or books, or movies, or other things you review… wiki pages are (or should be!) dynamic and can change often. If a page changes, the former rating of the page may no longer be accurate. That said, we do recognize the requirement, and all I can say publicly at this time is “we’re not ignoring it”.
Actually, I knew you weren’t ignoring it, because I saw that it had just been brought up on the customer support forum. I think the simplest way is simply to make it a part of the wiki functionality – someone makes a rating and someone else can change it if it doesn’t apply. You could display 1) The current (most recent) rating and 2) the average rating over time. If you can dig into the revision history, you could then see which people actually rated it high or not and whether there is a time trend with it (e.g. getting worse or better). You could also integrate this with the people module to see what pages certain people rated highly or not. If you wanted to get fancy, you could also develop some matching algorithm to develop some sort of recommendation engine (this is taking it to the next level though). There may be better ways to do it, of course, but this would be simple, consistent with the “Wiki Way,” an potentially very powerful.