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If social networking seems to be the intranet buzzword of 2008, you're right. Just last week we looked at Telligent, which is bringing tools such as blogs, forums, and wikis to the intranet, and now we've caught up with Socialcast, which offers a kind of MySpace for the workplace.

Socialcast was founded three years ago by Timothy Young, who originally wanted to help companies create social networks where they could communicate with their customers. Socialcast's first customers were entertainment giants, including Sony, Nickelodeon, and Viacom, and the Socialcast platform was first used on a site for the Pussycat Dolls.

But things change fast in the online world and by mid-2006 the music companies no longer had the same budgets for building entertainment properties. Socialcast's team decided to take what they'd learned and apply it to building social software for the enterprise.

An Internal Focus

The new Socialcast launched in January, 2007, with Guitar Center as the first client. With Socialcast's software, it offered employees a social space to meet online and exchange ideas with other employees.

Since then, Socialcast has turned form consumer sites to internal sites. The company's goal, says Young, is to "empower employees to create, expand, and exchange knowledge."

He's finding a lot of willing takers. Companies both large and small find themselves drowning under an e-mail tidal wave, unable to share or catalog the ideas that get passed around every day. The idea behind Socialcast is to make those discussions public, shareable, and searchable.

The MySpace Look

The Socialcast interface will be familiar if you've used MySpace or other social networking sites. The difference, though, is that everyone on Socialcast is a

The Socialcast interface.

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