QikCom: Not Ready For Enterprise Microstreaming Use

I have been looking at the various ‘enterprise twitter’ apps that are coming out, and I haven’t found the perfect solution for me yet, for a lightweight workstreaming tool.

I took a look at QikCom this week, and it falls short of my needs, I think.

QikCom doesn’t look much like Twitter, with the exception of the reverse chronolocial posting of the messages, and the follow/following model. Here’s my personal stream, after fooling with it for a day:

QikCom, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

My personal stream includes messages from people I am following and groups I have been invited to.

The ‘@’ sign is used to send messages to groups, which can be private and closed to only those invited. The use of @ replies and direct messages doesn’t appear to work, so if users wish to have private or chat-style give and take, it has to be conducted in the open.

The closed groups are interesting, but there is no way to post while looking just at that private stream, so it seems likely that users will make mistakes and openly post things that they would like to have be private:

QikCom - Group Feed, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

The ‘company’ stream shows all public stuff: all posts that users have made that are not directed to private groups. Note: since this is a non-federated enterprise tool, you can only communicate with users that have been invited by the adminstrator, presumably employees of the same company, or others involved in the company’s business, like consultants or clients.

QikCom, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

The open discourse model of Twitter might have been more productively reversed for the business setting. For example, it might be better that messages in general are directed to a specific context — associated with a project, or a group — unless explicitly made public to the company as a whole. And it may be the case that some people invited to participate in a specific group should not have access to the open company stream. For example, imagine that I want to invite a group of clients to a group to chat about their project privately, but I would like them to not have access to the company stream at all. As a result of these issues, I don’t think I can use QikCom for my purposes, although it might work for a traditional small company.

The product supports tags, but not in private groups. So a message can be tagged ‘#planning’ for example, and clicking on the tag brings up other messages with that tag.

The 140 character limitation of Twitter is adopted as the default, but can be overwritten by the administrator, up to 420 characters. Note: to be able to up this limit, or to invite users with emails other than the initial company email account, you must step up to a paid account.

QikCom - Admin, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

There is a ‘Mobile’ tab where you can supply your mobile number, but there is no implementation of SMS at the present time.

QikCom includes an integrated ‘TabStore’ which seems to be a neat concept, but in fact turns out to be a pain. The notion is that new services can be integrated into the product which can have their own price model. For example, adding task lists. However, the way that the TabStore ‘integrates’ these services is so unintegrated that there is not much benefit involved. Created tasks show up in the company stream, rather than in the personal stream of the people they are assigned to, which seems backwards to me. And they can’t be assigned to groups, which seems an obvious thing to allow.

A different take would have been to have the task lists supported by the TabStore app automatically associated with private groups or tags, for example. Imagine a list of tasks associated with ‘#planning’ or ‘@budget09’ showing up on those pages. Instead, the task lists are several clicks away. Alternatively, tasks could be created in the stream, like ‘!call John about the Feb sales meeting #sales’ and then added to the appropriate context. None of this takes place, and the other two examples of Tab applications are even less useful.

Here’s an example of a task being created:

QikCom - To Do List, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

There is a perhaps interesting org chart feature, that allows the admin to denote who reports to who, but it doesn’t seem to overlap with other functionality, like circles of messaging, or automatic creation of groups. So I don’t see its utility.

I haven’t mentioned the astonishingly unfinished feel of the app. There is no way to delete users — at least that I can find — or to uninstall Tab applications. It is possible to delete groups, but not to manage tags in any way aside from creating them. And while the company advertises that there is some way to use Alert Thingy as a client, I can not find any description of how to do it, and the company has not answered any of my support questions on that topic. Lastly, I can’t find a way to delete my account.

Conclusions

Taken as a proof of concept, QikCom shows promise and has some interesting features, but it is not ready for the relatively light weight use I had in mind and it definitely is not ready for the enterprise.