Socialtext Incorporated was a company based in

Palo Alto Palo Alto ( ; Spanish language, Spanish for ) is a charter city in northwestern Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. Th ...

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

, that produced

enterprise social software Enterprise social software (also known as or regarded as a major component of Enterprise 2.0), comprises social software as used in " enterprise" (business/ commercial) contexts. It includes social and networked modifications to corporate intranet ...

for companies. It offered an integrated suite of wiki tools and

social software Social software, also known as social apps or social platform includes communications and interactive tools that are often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle capturing, storing and presenting communication, usually writt ...

applications, including

microblogging Microblogging is a form of blogging using short posts without titles known as microposts or status updates. Microblogs "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links", which may be the ...

, user profiles, directories and other collaboration tools. They also maintained

mobile apps A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on d ...

for individual tools. The company was founded by Ross Mayfield and Peter Kaminski in 2002. Its investors included the

Omidyar Network Omidyar Network is a self-styled "philanthropic investment firm," composed of a foundation and an impact investment firm. Established in 2004 by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam, Omidyar Network has committed over US$1.5billion to no ...

Draper Fisher Jurvetson Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is an American venture capital firm. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth continues to be managed by co-founder John Fisher and co-founders Mark Ba ...

, Sapphire Ventures, and Bedford Funding. Their wiki and suite of tools, also called Socialtext, was open-sourced in 2006. As of 2019, a version of the suite was still available as a service of the Learning Technologies Group. However, upddates on social media ended on 2016.

Development

Socialtext's

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

stack was initially based on Brian Ingerson's perl library Kwiki. As of 2006, it was available as a hosted service, or as a standalone hardware appliance. Starting in 2005, the company began releasing its wiki tools under an open source license, starting with its ''wikiwyg'' editor. In 2006, it partnered with

Dan Bricklin Daniel Singer Bricklin (born July 16, 1951) is an American businessman and engineer who is the co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program. He also founded Software Garden, Inc., of which he is currently president, ...

to distribute his wiki spreadsheet tool, ''wikicalc''.

Audrey Tang Tang Feng ( zh, t=唐鳳, p=Táng Fèng; born 18 April 1981), also known by her English name Audrey, is a Taiwanese people, Taiwanese politician and free software programmer who served as the first Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan from Augu ...

consulted with them on their interaction design. The company also supported an ecosystem of open-source wiki developers, and ran a monthly Wiki Wednesdays salon for many years. In 2010, Socialtext 4.0 offered

LDAP The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP ) is an open, vendor-neutral, industry standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed Directory service, directory information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) networ ...

and

Active Directory Active Directory (AD) is a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. Windows Server operating systems include it as a set of processes and services. Originally, only centralized domain management used Active Direct ...

integration, Single Sign-On,

REST API REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of ...

, and connectors to Salesforce.com and

SharePoint SharePoint is a collection of enterprise content management and knowledge management tools developed by Microsoft. Launched in 2001, it was initially bundled with Windows Server as Windows SharePoint Server, then renamed to Microsoft Office ...

. The last major release was Socialtext 6.0, in 2014.

Acquisition and aftermath

In 2012, Socialtext was acquired by Bedford Funding, a

private equity firm A private equity firm or private equity company (often described as a financial sponsor) is an investment management company that provides financial backing and makes investments in the private equity of a Startup company, startup or of an existin ...

that also owned other enterprise social tools, including PeopleFluent, a tool for enterprise talent development. Socialtext became a subsidiary of PeopleFluent, and continued operating under its own name within the larger organization. In 2019, PeopleFluent was acquired by Learning Technologies Group.

References

External links

* as of 2013 (via archive.org) {{Wiki software Software companies based in California Private equity portfolio companies Defunct software companies of the United States Wiki farms Knowledge markets Companies based in Palo Alto, California

Development

Acquisition and aftermath

See also

References

External links