 |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|
According to the web site for the new product:
SuiteTwo is a rich set of interconnected services that combine to improve productivity and enable high-engagement marketing
From where I sit, which is the uninformed chair of someone reading their website, it looks as though SuiteTwo is a mashup of sorts. It has taken what they call the "best of breed" applications in the RSS subscription, RSS publication, blog authoring/hosting, Wiki, and social networking spaces and smashed them all together into a single appliance.
This is pretty intriguing on a couple of points. I think what we're looking at is a trend toward the commoditization of social networking as a whole. Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networking, and RSS pub/sub are becoming ubiquitous. So much so that it is becoming a difficult task to discern the "new product SPAM" from the innovative new ideas that might be struggling to get to the surface amid all the flotsam and jetsam.
Boiled down to the technical underbelly of the product (where I am most likely to be found poking around...), it is basically taking a couple of products such as MoveableType, SocialText, SimpleFeed, NewsGator, and VisiblePath and putting them on a single appliance, slapping a cohesive search around the entire thing, and then exposing all of that data to the appliance and to the outside world through RSS feeds and RSS feed aggregations.
It sounds like a pretty good concept, and even supports tagging. However, one crucial Web 2.0 feature is missing from this appliance: bookmarks. If you've got tagging, you've got wikis, and you've got blogs, then why would you leave off a feature so crucial to knowledge collaboration as bookmarks?
Anyway, I think this is a pretty slick idea. A company new to the whole "Web 2.0" thing can simply go to Intel, get their shiny "Web 2.0" box, and get off the ground. At least that's the partyline. The key to Web 2.0 isn't the technology enabling it, its the people using it. If your organization isn't full of people comitted to using blogs, wikis, RSS, and social networking - the appliance isn't going to help. On the other hand, if your organization is full of people clamouring for new Web 2.0/social networking stuff and they want a private, enterprise-class Web2.0 style social network without all the crap and detritis you find with MySpace - then this little appliance might be the way to go.
I wasn't able to get a price on it, but I'm thinking if you bundled one of these with a Google mini, and included a couple free coffee mugs and some other SWAG, it might be a good seller :)
