Is your organization understanding the values here? It is more than just chats between two people, it is seeing data and conversations flowing throughout your enterprise that can be searched, sorted, tagged and archived.  How much is lost from knowledge archives when you do not log and publicly provide access to all the chats about projects, customers and partners?  Sure, there is some private ones, but have those in private.  The rest is for your business, about your business.  So why does it get treated like personal information.  I blogged about two other products last week and got access to two more this week.

QikCom
Another newcomer into the game, they entice you by offering free administration for your site, hoping you will buy into premium services later.  The premium service includes tabs that can be added to your user interface.  The current list was only 3 tabs for to-do's, competition and frequent numbers.  I am betting they will look to developers to offer tabs for the future growth.

 One cool part was the ability to build an organization chart of sorts for your company.

This adds a level of functionality to the mass amounts of data that could be flowing through the system. Being able to follow not only a flow of conversation, but the flow of reporting chain would be an incredible benefit.  Otherwise, it is what you would expect, a Twitter client.  Now, I did not see alternate clients like a desktop or IM integrated and that is a huge disappointment.

Another key feature is the ability to follow and manage tags for content.  So you can not just find and follow persons, but actually follow tags of conversations.  We are all learning about tags as we social bookmark, so extending this to conversations makes sense.  If this ever face to face communication we are doomed as a society, but that is another issue.

Present.ly
Presently has a few levels of membership offering which changes the landscape.  It appeared that even their free limited function version expired in 60 days, and that was very unclear.  While it said "free" it then said it would expire.  I am presuming it is more of a trial version.

They also offer some administration abilities and groups.  Groups is different than the org chart above since I can grab people from all over the organization.  You can have both public and private groups offering first time users some immediate benefit, no more hunting around trying to find people on the system.

I could not access the option for "Devices" since I was not on at least a Basic plan.  There was a long list of notification options, from email to RSS feeds for all sorts of events.  That was a nice touch on their part.


I would really like both of these companies to offer the limited function options with alternate client ability.  it would make them stronger players in the game for sure.  But enterprise Twitter functions are coming, the question is how long till your company gets on board?