ReadWriteWeb
- December 6, 2009
Tibco: A Twitter Like Service That’s About Subjects More Than People
Tibco is coming out with a Twitter like service that has an emphasis on subject matters more than following people.
In Tibco’s view, the enterprise is not about the people anymore but the subject and contextual information that relates to a person’s job. The value is in decoupling the subject matter from the person so the right information can be found quickly and easily.
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The service is called tibbr, which Tibco describes as a workplace communications tool. Tibco has a corporate focus on real-time technologies. In June, the company announced Tibco Silver, a cloud-based platform for developing applications in the enterprise. tibbr is built on the Silver platform.
tibbr is a real-time technology that is definitely different than a service like Salesforce Chatter, which aggregates commentary on different matters to give context and knowledge about a particular topic.
Instead, tibbr will offer a service that is more about finding information about the most granular of topics.
We find this approach a bit cold, perhaps even taking a bit of the soul out of what real-time social technologies have historically provided. But this may be precisely the point. Corporations may be places filled with people but it is the work and the efficiency that drive performance. Companies are flooded with information, most of it junk. The demand is not for more talk but for ways to be notified of information when it becomes available.
We are reminded of Attensa, which provides a service that finds connections and aggregates data on different topics. Individuals are notified when a reference to the data is discovered.
tibbr is agnostic about the actual user. The subject may represent an individual, an application or a business process. This seems like search or discovery in many regards, driven by a subscription mechanism like a feed.
The focus on subject matter in tibbr makes conversation almost secondary by eliminating what it calls “static and unwanted information clutter.” The intention is to eliminate duplicate information and “reply all,” email strings.
tibbr is definitely an intriguing service that represents how real-time technologies are taking different forms in the settings of the enterprise.
tibbr will be available in the first quarter of 2010.
