Socialtext

Last updated
Socialtext
Type Private
FoundedDecember 2002
Headquarters,
USA
Key people
Ross Mayfield (Founder)
Eugene Lee (CEO) until 2012
Website www.socialtext.com [ dead link ]

Socialtext Incorporated was a company based in Palo Alto, California, that produced enterprise social software for companies. It offered an integrated suite of wiki tools and social software applications, including microblogging, user profiles, directories and other collaboration tools. They also maintained mobile apps for individual tools.

Contents

The company was founded by Ross Mayfield and Peter Kaminsky in 2002. Its investors included the Omidyar Network, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Sapphire Ventures, and Bedford Funding. Their wiki and suite of tools, also called Socialtext, was open-sourced in 2006. As of 2019, a version of the suite was still available as a service of the Learning Technologies Group. [1]

Development

Socialtext's software stack was initially based on Brian Ingerson's perl library Kwiki. As of 2006, it was available as a hosted service, or as a standalone hardware appliance.

Starting in 2005, the company began releasing its wiki tools under an open source license, starting with its wikiwyg editor. [2] In 2006, it partnered with Dan Bricklin to distribute his wiki spreadsheet tool, wikicalc. [3] [4] Audrey Tang consulted with them on their interaction design. [5] The company also supported an ecosystem of open-source wiki developers, and ran a monthly Wiki Wednesdays salon for many years. [6]

In 2010, Socialtext 4.0 offered LDAP and Active Directory integration, Single Sign-On, REST API, and connectors to Salesforce.com and SharePoint. [7] The last major release was Socialtext 6.0, in 2014. [8]

Acquisition and aftermath

In 2012, Socialtext was acquired by Bedford Funding, a private equity firm that also owned other enterprise social tools, including PeopleFluent, a tool for enterprise talent development. [9] Socialtext became a subsidiary of PeopleFluent, and continued operating under its own name within the larger organization. [10] In 2019, PeopleFluent was acquired by Learning Technologies Group. [1]

See also

Related Research Articles

Wiki software Collaborative software that runs a wiki

A Wiki software, is collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers. The content, including previous revisions, is usually stored in either a file system or a database. Wikis are a type of web content management system, and the most commonly supported off-the-shelf software that web hosting facilities offer.

Social software, also known as social apps, include communication and interactive tools often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a pair or group of users. They focus on establishing and maintaining a connection among users, facilitating the mechanics of conversation and talk. Social software generally refers to software that makes collaborative behaviour, the organisation and moulding of communities, self-expression, social interaction and feedback possible for individuals. Another element of the existing definition of social software is that it allows for the structured mediation of opinion between people, in a centralized or self-regulating manner. The most improved area for social software is that Web 2.0 applications can all promote cooperation between people and the creation of online communities more than ever before.

Progress Software Corporation (Progress) is an American public company that offers software for creating and deploying business applications. Headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts with offices in 16 countries, the company posted revenues of $531.3 million (USD) in 2021 and employs approximately 2100 people.

Audrey Tang Taiwanese software programmer (born 1981)

Audrey Tang is a Taiwanese free software programmer and Digital Minister of Taiwan, who has been described as one of the "ten greatest Taiwanese computing personalities". In August 2016, Tang was invited to join Taiwan's Executive Yuan as a minister without portfolio, making her the first transgender and the first non-binary official in the top executive cabinet. Tang has identified as "post-gender" and accepts "whatever pronoun people want to describe me with online." Tang is a community leader of Haskell and Perl and the core member of G0v.

Ross Mayfield American businessman

Ross Mayfield is an American Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Pingpad. The former CEO of Socialtext, and former Vice President of Business Development of SlideShare. He is also a regular blogger and public speaker.

openSUSE Community-supported Linux distribution

openSUSE is a project that serves to promote the use of free and open-source software.

wikiCalc is a web application, created by Dan Bricklin, that allows for the creation and editing of spreadsheets through a wiki-style user-editable interface. It is currently released as version 1.0 for use on Windows, Mac, Linux/Unix, and other platforms that can run the Perl language.

Traction TeamPage is a proprietary enterprise 2.0 social software product developed by Traction Software Inc of Providence, Rhode Island.

Linux Foundation Non-profit technology consortium to develop the Linux operating system

The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit technology consortium founded in 2000 as a merger between Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group to standardize Linux, support its growth, and promote its commercial adoption. Additionally, it hosts and promotes the collaborative development of open source software projects. It is a major force in promoting diversity and inclusion in both Linux and the wider open source software community.

EPAM Systems American technology company

EPAM Systems, Inc. is an American company that specializes in service development, digital platform engineering, and digital product design. One of the world's largest manufacturers of custom software and consulting providers. The company's headquarters is located in Newtown, Pennsylvania, and its branches are represented in more than 40 countries.

History of wikis History of wiki collaborative platforms

The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".

This comparison of wiki hosting services or wiki farms details only notable online services which host wiki-style editable web pages. General characteristics of cost, presence of advertising, licensing are compared, as are technical differences in editing, features, wiki engine, multilingual support and syntax support.

Elium, previously referred to as Knowledge Plaza, is a Software as a Service used for enterprise knowledge sharing within organisations. It supports use cases for knowledge management, social bookmarking, document management, wikis and internal social network. It was initially designed as an information management tool for knowledge workers and is often used for collaborative research projects, market intelligence, information brokerage, etc.

Joyent Inc. was a software and services company based in San Francisco, California. Specializing in cloud computing, it marketed infrastructure-as-a-service. On June 15, 2016, the company was acquired by Samsung Electronics.

GroveSite is a privately held online collaboration software company headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. The company offers secure online workspaces, sometimes called hosted wikis, to small and medium-sized businesses, and to larger enterprises who need to collaborate securely outside the Ipfirewall. Their flagship product, GroveSite 5.0, includes document management, web project management, wiki web pages, and other collaboration features. In January 2011, the company released an online relational database product that is also targeted at business users.

LibreOffice Calc Spreadsheet component of LibreOffice

LibreOffice Calc is the spreadsheet component of the LibreOffice software package.

Phabricator Suite of web-based software development collaboration tools

Phabricator is a suite of web-based development collaboration tools, including:

References

  1. 1 2 Larsen, Michael. "Who You Gonna' Call? #30DaysOfTesting Testability" . Retrieved 2022-05-29.
  2. Martens, China (2005-10-05). "Socialtext to open-source bulk of its software". Computerworld. Retrieved 2022-05-29.
  3. Walling, Steven; ReadWriteWeb. "30 Years After VisiCalc, Socialtext Unveils SocialCalc and Freemium Pricing - NYTimes.com". archive.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2022-05-31.
  4. "wikiCalc Partnership with SocialText". danbricklin.com. Retrieved 2022-05-29.
  5. "Audrey Tang". World Economic Forum. Retrieved 2022-05-31.
  6. "Socialtext "Wiki Wednesday" Hackathon Results". Christine. Retrieved 2022-05-29.
  7. GigaOm, SIMON MACKIE of. "Socialtext 4.0 Adds Groups, Channels - NYTimes.com". archive.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2022-05-29.
  8. "KMWorld Trend-Setting Products of 2014". www.kmworld.com. Retrieved 2022-05-29.
  9. "Bedford Funding -- Socialtext". www.bedfordfunding.com. Retrieved 2022-05-29.
  10. "SocialText Merges With PeopleFluent After Sale". CMSWire.com. Retrieved 2022-05-28.