Socialtext Incorporated was a company based in

Palo Alto Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was estab ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

, 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 intranets a ...

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

social software Social software, also known as social apps or social platform, include communications and interactive tools that are often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usua ...

applications, including

microblogging Microblogging is a form of social network that permits only short posts. They "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links",. Retrieved June 5, 2014 which may be the major reason for ...

, 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 de ...

for individual tools. The company was founded by

Ross Mayfield Ross Mayfield is an American Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Pingpad. The former CEO of Socialtext, and former Vice President of Business Development of SlideShare. He is also a regular blogger and public s ...

and

Peter Kaminsky Peter may refer to: People * List of people named Peter, a list of people and fictional characters with the given name * Peter (given name) ** Saint Peter (died 60s), apostle of Jesus, leader of the early Christian Church * Peter (surname), a sur ...

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 $1.5billion to n ...

Draper Fisher Jurvetson Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is an American venture capital firm focused on investments in enterprise, consumer and disruptive technologies. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth ...

Sapphire Ventures Sapphire Ventures (stylized as SAPPHIRE) is a venture capital firm with offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, Austin, and London. The firm is considered one of the world's premier venture capital firms. The firm primarily invests in Series B t ...

, 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.

Development

Socialtext's

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

stack was initially based on Brian Ingerson's perl library Kwikibr>
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 the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. He also founded Software Garden, Inc., of which he is currently president, and T ...

to distribute his wiki spreadsheet tool, ''wikicalc''. Audrey Tang 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 information services over an Internet Protocol (IP) network. Directory servi ...

and

Active Directory Active Directory (AD) is a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. It is included in most Windows Server operating systems as a set of processes and services. Initially, Active Directory was used only for centralize ...

integration,

Single Sign-On Single sign-on (SSO) is an authentication scheme that allows a user to log in with a single ID to any of several related, yet independent, software systems. True single sign-on allows the user to log in once and access services without re-enterin ...

, REST API, and connectors to

Salesforce.com Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, an ...

and

SharePoint SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform that integrates natively with Microsoft Office. Launched in 2001, SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system, but the product is highly configurable and its usage v ...

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

Acquisition and aftermath

In 2012, Socialtext was acquired by

Bedford Funding Bedford is a market town in Bedfordshire, England. At the 2011 Census, the population of the Bedford built-up area (including Biddenham and Kempston) was 106,940, making it the second-largest settlement in Bedfordshire, behind Luton, whilst t ...

, a

private equity firm A private equity firm is an investment management company that provides financial backing and makes investments in the private equity of startup or operating companies through a variety of loosely affiliated investment strategies including leve ...

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) Software companies based in California Private equity portfolio companies Software companies of the United States Wiki farms Knowledge markets Companies based in Palo Alto, California {{US-media-company-stub

Development

Acquisition and aftermath

See also

References

External links