Top enterprise social networking apps

We know that Facebook has revolutionized the way most people spend their time at work, by not working. We also know that while the phenomenon of spending a ton of time interacting with old friends and college buddies gives managers a headache, it also makes them wonder if they could increase collaboration within the company.

As Enteprise 2.0 guru and Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee said in November 2007

We need to keep in mind that most E2.0 tools are new, and that their acceptance depends on shifts in perspective on the part of business leaders and decision makers, shifts for which the word ‘seismic’ might not be an overstatement. Enterprise 2.0 tools have no inherent respect for organizational boundaries, hierarchies, or job titles. They facilitate self-organization and emergent rather than imposed structure. They require line managers, compliance officers, and other stewards to trust that users will not deliberately or inadvertently use them inappropriately. They require these stewards to become comfortable with collaboration environments that “practice the philosophy of making it easy to correct mistakes, rather than making it difficult to make them” as Jimmy Wales has said. They require, in short, the re-examination and often the reversal of many longstanding assumptions and practices. It is not in the least disrespectful or contemptuous of today’s managers to say that it will take them some time to get used to this.

Dan Farber from ZDNet had this to say back in Feb, 2008:

I have a feeling that social networking adoption will sneak up on companies, as IM did in the past decade, faster than Forrester’s survey indicates. It will happen in pockets rather than as large scale deployments, which will happen when the large enterprise vendors that corporations like to deal with build it into their platforms. It will be driven by those “stewards” mentioned by McAfee who viscerally get the value of a social Web in business. I’ll predict 2009 as the year of enterprise social networks.

Is his prediction true? A Gartner study on Enterprise Social Networks found a crowded market in the medium sized business segment.

A Forrestor research shows the leaders in this space:

I went ahead and tried out Social Text that is featured in the Gartner study and Jive that is the clear leader in the Forrestor study. After several attempts at signup failed, I found Social Text to be more like a groupware system of old. To their credit, they did send me an email today apologizing for their server issues. Jive was better, but still looked and felt more like a bulletin board type discussion forum than an engaging social network.

Have you found any social networks that create engaging relationships between the user and their clients while providing avenues for collaboration in a secure environment?