Secure Tweets: Three Business Apps Rated

The solution could be to implement an access-controlled Twitter-like service for business use. This is basically the idea behind Socialcast.

To get started with Socialcast I simply went to www.socialcast.com and started up a company account (free for up to 10 users, and $1 (£0.65) per month for each additional user with special pricing for large companies).

Once you sign up, Socialcast provides a unique company URL in the form of companyname.socialcast.com. This is good from a company branding standpoint, although at first it was a bit confusing when I forgot my custom site name.

When I first logged into Socialcast, it definitely seemed similar to Twitter, but with a nicer look and some key differences. For example, instead of asking “What are you doing?” Socialcast asks “What’s on your mind?”

Users can enter standard Twitter-like messages about their status and things they are thinking about. Messages can be entered from the main Socialcast screen or sent through e-mail to the service. Socialcast also has some nice tools for categorising and tagging messages.

Any message that ends in a question mark gets classified as a question and can then be searched and sorted in this way. Special tags can also be used within messages to help with filtering and searching.

For example, putting #idea in a message will classify it as an idea. This also works with any tag you want to use simply by putting # in front of a word. So it would be possible to classify all sales discussions by adding #sales to these messages.

Messages can have any file type attached to them (with images appearing in the message), and can also be put into categories that can be configured by your company.

Like Twitter, employees can choose to follow other employees on Socialcast and stay up-to-date on all of their messages. Users can also reply to other messages both publicly and privately.

A nice feature is one that allows for the creation of public and private groups; in the latter, users can join and engage in special topic discussions or in discussions private to all but the group members.

Additionally, users can choose to integrate external feeds and services, bringing about capabilities similar to those in FriendFeed (a real time aggregator of feeds from a range of social media). However, in a business system, this could potentially get out of hand the way some feeds are constantly updated.

The social networking aspects of Socialcast are fairly basic but effective. Users create profiles with all of their relevant company and contact information, and other users can easily view this data by using the ‘people’ tab and searching within Socialcast.