Activity Streams oriented Desktop is becoming a big business. Twitter and Facebook fanatics can now not live any more without having their “Life Streaming” Desktop, Web Client or iPhone application being permanently connected to their Social Network. Clients such as Seesmic, TweetDeck, Sobees (or Tweetie and Twitterrific for the iPhone) are becoming increasingly popular.

But today Twitter and FaceBook are not used only by the Generation X or Y or by Techies but also by Marketing professionals which need to better track their brands and socially support their network of stakeholders throughout all the available social networks. So commercial and professional versions of the aforementioned applications are currently being rapidly developed. Others are only focusing on this market niche such as Co-tweet or Hoot Suite.

But what about Enterprise users? How could a company deploy its own private micro-blogging service and let its employees leverage all the features existing in such activity Streams desktops but connected to their private micro-blogging service?

What is the status of Activity Streaming in the Enterprise today?

First of all, and this was a surprise to me, there are (still) not so much Twitter-like Enterprise servers a company can buy today.

Of course you have Yammer, one of the first “private Twitter” but it only exists in a SaaS On-Demand version and could not be installed internally on your company servers. With an increased need for legal E-Discovery compliance which now also includes instant messages and still lots of confidentially fears about all these social networks in big companies, I am not sure that such a service will really fit with the need of Fortune 1000 companies.

SocialText looks like the only company providing a really serious On-Site micro-blogging server today. But they are providing it with their own SocialText Desktop client. This means that an employee which needs to follow either its multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts or its internal micro-blogging activity streams will need to multiply the number of installed clients.

This is in fact even worst if you start really looking at what is currently happening on within a large company. Employees are not only splitting their public and companies social networks but they have to deal with a rapidly increasing numbers of “business streams”: every application is today becoming “social-enabled” and is then trying to push and promote its own activity streams.

Farsheed Tari, CEO of ConnectBeam a pioneer in Enterprise Social Bookmarking, did recently an interesting analysis of the situation:

“Imagine in a large Fortune global 500 enterprise, Corporate IT has decided to rollout SharePoint MOSS 2007 – that includes wiki and blog capabilities – and NewsGator RSS as company-wide news feed and collaboration platform. Engineering in R&D department, however, have been using Atlassian Confluence wiki to manage day-to-day design, and project team collaborations for a while. The marketing team has been using the Yammer microblogging service for the last 3 months to communicate company news and messages with all employees. The technical support team, on the other hand, has been piloting and now ready to roll out Telligent Community to engage with external customers and partners. There are probably other homegrown tools and solutions in play but let’s just assume this is the current social software footprint at this company. In the long run, each tool above will greatly help employees and management solve a series of collaboration and communication problems. However as ‘standalone solutions’ they create new ‘social information silos’ because they don’t communicate with each other. The content stored in the Confluence wiki by the engineering team might be very valuable and relevant to the product marketing team who uses SharePoint on a daily basis, but don’t necessarily use the R&D wiki – they might not even know that wiki exists! So this and similar real world examples from our clients illustrate the need to aggregate social activities and user generated content across the enterprise regardless of the originating source.”

Everyone will certainly agree that an employee activity stream is more complex than just a connexion to the employee Yammer-like life stream. I then fully share Farsheed Tari point of view: companies which are trying to better address Enterprise 2.0 will have to deal with in an hetergenous world qualified by dozens of different activity streams which needs to be re-aggregate for each employee.

In fact an employee activity stream is composed of several different types of streams:

• His external social activity streams (for example to connect his to his pairs, suppliers or customers)
• His Internal social activity streams (for example to securely and confidentially connect him to his colleagues and other internal experts)
• Other automated system streams (such as a WCM or a SoCO application which is automatically generating a “log” to warn to him that he needs to review a document, publish a page or that one of his colleagues just annotated one of his internal blog)

And this is not stupid to think that an employee may want to access to a unified and aggregated view of all his different “activity streams” the whole being consolidated into one single chronological “business life stream”.

Now where I do not necessarily agree with Farsheed Tari is on the fact that we need another Social Activity Platform to manage it. Wouldn’t it be the job of existing Activity Streams Desktops? Do you really need another server-side platform to duplicate all these streams already stored in another system.

Call for OpenSocial support in existing Activity Streams Clients

In the last couple of months most activity streams desktops added support for multiple accounts (e.g: if you have to manage one generic twitter account for your company and another private one) or for multiple providers (e.g. most clients can now retrieve both your twitter and facebook activity streams simultaneously).

But is seems that no one still support a generic way to add customized activity streams. All Streams Providers looks like having been hardcoded to the Twitter and Facebook online API. I am pretty sure that most Enterprise Systems which are generating some forms or others of activity streams are already or will soon leverage the OpenSocial standard. Mainly because it is free and that some ready-to-use implementations already exists (e.g: Apache Shindig)

It sounds like surprising that no one of these Activity Streams Desktop Clients supports OpenSocial. It would be so simple to let each users customize additional, potentially private, OpenSocial configurations (or at least let the company developers add another type of custom connector). We could even easily imagine that a company could pre-configure and deploy a paid version of such a Web/Desktop/iPhone client on all the employees PCs, Laptops or enterprise phones with all their internal and external activity streams already pre-configured. If you combine such an additional feature with the more and more powerful user experience that such clients are offering and some built-in analytics capabilities already offered by some of them (cf: Co-Tweet or Hoove Suite) in order to help business managers track what employees are doing with such a solution, you could already get a pretty interesting Enterprise-ready solution.

Of course all these Desktop Clients are currently more focused on rapidly gaining B2C market shares rather than trying to focus on more complex B2B needs. But if you consider that Google is trying to promote new open social-ready applications for its iGoogle platform related to the fact that it could also rapidly help address some financially interesting B2B opportunities in the same time, I hope we will rapidly see some OpenSocial support within all these clients.

Come one Seesmic, TweetDesk or other Sobees folks, I am sure you can easily add a generic support for OpenSocial within your Activity Streams Clients!