SocialCast Launches Enterprise Micro-Blogging Tool Today

SocialCast positions itself as a provider of corporate networking and collaboration platform to help businesses leverage the power of networking between employees in the most creative ways. Basically that means that any business can use SocialCast platform to build a social network for its employees and use it as a centralized communications hub.

Today SocialCast announces launch of a micro-blogging and knowledge management tool for the platform that Rafe Needleman has already named “FriendFeed for your business”. And the similarities are obvious here: employees can update their status with updates, ideas or suggestions. All of the updates can be recorded into a worklog for a team manager to be able to see the progress for all the team members.

The new messaging tool is based on self-service model, which means that a company can have it installed independently and use in whatever way it thinks appropriate without any sales procedures or set-up time involved. But the application does come up at a cost of $5 per user per month after the initial free one-month trial.

One of the most important features of the newly launched tool is that it allows for updates on the go - by email or using a smarphone - so this is supposed to eliminate problems when a particular employee is not in the office but could be a valuable addition to a discussion of a problem or an idea.

Ideally, the micro-blogging tool for businesses will provide a centralized place to keep all the conversations in one clean, easy-to-use place accessible from almost any device by any employee. Unfortunately, the price tag without any “unlimited” subscription plan seems like on factor that could prevent some companies from adopting the tool for the maximum number of employees or clients maybe.

Besides, I have a feeling here that as it is the platform will have a hard time gaining any adopters at all - simply because not enough end users are familiar with the concept of FriendFeed and how it operates. And I have a feeling that for a company to implement SocialCast micro-blogging tool for its employees and connections, there must be at least some people that already understand the concept of micro-blogging enough to explain it to the management and find some arguments to prove this will work for this particular company. I can believe that such a tool will be welcomed with enthusiasm in CNET where many employees already use a few microblogging tools and the creative nature of work may require that people exchange ideas or suggestions. But for a more traditional company to adopt SocialCast micro-blogging tool I think FriendFeed will need to reach more mainstream users first itself.