According to Gartner, 2011 social software revenue will approach USD 1 Billion. It seems likely that with companies like IBM Lotus, Trilog Group, Tibco, SocialText and others builing their social portfolios around the concept of syndicated activity streams, 2011 will become the year when social software really makes strides in enterprise adoption.
The reality is that social software is expanding beyond the social interactions of people, and is embracing the integration of the “social” activity of machines, projects, and processes.
Imagine a single activity stream that shows your human interactions, notices of new or late tasks from your projects, an alert from a file server that it is low on disk space, or that a business process is failing SLAs. A single activity stream that shows questions that you might be able to answer asked by people you’ve never met. Add that to the ability to expand this activity stream selectively with business partners and customers, and the power of the social business software activity stream becomes apparent.
This is the promise of social business software standards like Activity Streams – the emergence of social convergence.
This is a good summary, to which I completely agree. What I’m unsure about is whether small niches will be swept up into the social business space, or whether other tools will simply integrate with the big social biz providers, to push content into the activity streams. I see lots of innovation management providers integrating with Jive and IBM Connections, for example, and I wonder whether the whole innovation tool-suite space will simply be gobbled up by social biz at some point, and similarly for other smaller spaces too.