Today you have to choose as an enterprise if you are in the Yammer camp, the Chatter camp or one of the other similiar locked down tools.   What frustrates me is that a Chatter conversation cannot mix with a Yammer conversation and vice-versa.  We are expected that all the people we need to socialise for work will be on the same tool.  By the way this is the same in the consumer social space, Google+ and Facebook don’t mix and match either.

But imagine that you had a cellphone and you could only talk to people on the same carrier as you.  Frustrating hey.  You’d have to either convince everyone to join AT&T or whoever OR you would have to have a phone for each carrier !

Of course you can phone anybody on any carrier on any network on any device anywhere in the world.

We need the same open-standards for social especially in the corporate space.  B2B, B2C, etc.  means we do not have control on the tools each person and each company will have and we cannot be constrained in our ability to function, collaborate and progress by the tools.

When will we see open-standards for social.  I am not holding my breath.  The open standards movements of the 90’s that led to HTML and other advances seems to have given way to closed-walled gardens.  These closed-walled gardens are great for the powerful vendors as they lock you into their system.  Apple does it with their AppStore ecosystem, Microsoft with their SharePoint/Yammer space, Salesforce with theirs.

I hope for change but suspect it won’t come from these big companies but instead from some small startup that works out the magic sauce to get these to interact.  Of course we will then have to watch out for the lawyers and patent trolls.  Hopefully the start up will survive.