During the last months we at Communardo have experimented a lot with social software – and in fact also through the last 7 years before. Wikis, blogs & co. have played a mayor role in our customer engagements (e.g. for Intranet 2.0) but also in our internal IT-landscape. Especially, in our own practice we sense a rising demand to professionalize the use of micro-content like short messages, notes, hints & tipps, hyperlinks. E-mail, instant messaging and personal folders are just not the right place to store these bits of information with stedily growing importance.

The idea, just to use twitter or some kind of logged instant messaging is equally charming but not suitable. Whereas the strength of twitter.com lies in the building and up-keeping of social and professional networks an in PR and marketing it is – at least in our opinion – not really usable for enterprise use. Instead of following a people-centric approach (“follow”) we are focusing on topic-centric communication. We think that this suites better the needs in our business world. We need at least some amount of order and structure just as we need discretion and access control and persistent storage of content. This is what we miss at twitter.com and its accompanying services.

This is the reason why a team of software engineers at Communardo has started a project to develop an own microblogging platform. We have been inspired by first tests of project blogs based on wordpress with the Prologue Theme and by the possibilities of Ajax & Co. in the frontend as well as Java in the backend to build a company-wide communications platform that allows for topic-centric microblogging.

We are excited about the results of our work an the large number of possible applications that are currently beeing discussed in the enterprise 2.0 community, e.g  here and here and here. As a consequence we decided to build an online-service based on our software – communote.com.

At present we are working intensively to build a scalable multi-client internet platform. In a couple of weeks we will make communote available to those who would like to beta-test it. In the meantime, there is the possibility to register for beta-testing at communote.com.

Please follow our weblog in English (this is where you are) as well as in German at humannetworkcompetence.de und via www.twitter.com/communote where we will regularly write posts on new features, use cases and new ideas.

Communote combines many brilliant ideas from blogging, tagging and filtering. This is a first glimpse at the user interface:

Many excellent people are engaged in building communote.com. At this place a big THANK YOU to Torsten, Martin, Stefan, Ronny, Markus, Katja, Tobias, Falk, Martin, Jens, René, Niels, Daniela, Sebastian, Ilja and all those that have been working in the background to make communote happen!