Facebook right now has over 400 million active users, with half of them logging into Facebook every day. When you add users of other social networks the trend we can see a clear rise of social networks as a communication platform. We used to look at social networks as an interactive address books but it they’ve evolved beyond that. Today the core feature of social network is a communication stream that allows users to post their own messages as well as comment and discuss what others are posting and doing. Based on the usage and growth numbers of social networks we can see that users are fully embracing this new way of communication and moving away from instant messaging and email for things that they’re willing to share with their broader circle of friends.

As the generation of web savvy people move their communication into streams and prove that it works for their non-work interaction, it’s now time to start comparing how our internal enterprise platforms enable them to use these efficient ways of communication in a way that makes their work more efficient. How much work does it take them to update a wiki page or to figure out who to email their thoughts to? Are our mailing-lists really being used and how do we store documents and drafts of our past projects?

Benefits of communicating within social streams are clear enough that in a last year a whole new branch of enterprise oriented social streams offerings emerged. Companies like SocialText, Yammer and even SalesForce’s Chatter (as well as our Flowr), are all offering their takes of social streams and are integrating it into enterprises in a different ways. Proposed benefits are clear with businesses reporting much better internal communication, less email overload and more insightful real-time conversation.

Can you afford not to evaluate benefits of social streams in your business?

We’re happy to announce that we’ve been selected as one of the 20 companies to present at the Plugg conference. Plugg is a platform for the most innovative startups in Europe to be able to connect to potential investors and share experience with other entrepreneurs.

Meet us there or contact Davorin (@davorin), if you happen to be in Brussels at the same time and would like to meet with us.

Working closely with our first beta users we’ve identified a number of possible improvements in the interface and existing work-flow. This lead the redesign efforts in refreshed user interface that we’re introducing today. First thing that you’ll notice is simplified home screen with less buttons that will help you focus on the primary task – sharing of items and status updates.

Other notable changes include:

• unread messages counter next to flows
• tools page for easy access to bookmarklet and mobile apps
• when joining a group, group flow in the sidebar is not automatically created anymore
• improved events interface
• online colleagues indicator in the sidebar

As always, use the Feedback button in your Flowr interface to let us know if we you discover a bug or realization that there is something that you miss in the interface.

As Real-Time evolved as the next evolutionary step for the Web, it’s time to start looking into the future. What will the next steps look like, what technologies are emerging and available today and what do we still need to build in order to enable next generation of Web Applications.

Matjaž Lipuš, our CTO,  covered these questions in his technical talk at RealTime WebCamp this past weekend. There are lots of useful tips and bits of experience hidden inside:

Simple status updates as we know them now are with us because Twitter limits us to 140 characters of text-only message. We can embed links or use micro-syntax (# – hashtags, @ – at replies, etc.) to make it richer but it stops there. While this might make sense if you’re trying to keep 100% compatibility with SMS, it doesn’t make sense in today’s IT enabled Enterprise. Laptops and smart devices (iPhone, BlackBerry) are now part of our basic work tools, so there is no need to limit communication to 140 characters of text.

That is why Flowr goes beyond simple status updates and allows you to post rich status updates that are easy to read and interact with. This allows you to post a link to SlideShare and Flowr will automatically generate embed and allow others to view it directly from inside the application.

There are also other types of messages like polls, TODO’s, events, ideas and questions that each has its own specific interaction type, making it easier to quickly scan and filter the stream of messages. We also make sure to embed extra meta-data to the status updates when we can, like automatically tagging links that you share to make it even easier for later retrieval.

While a most of the messages posted to our internal Flowr are still simple text, we’re loving the liberating feeling that allows you to post more extensive and information rich content when you need to, without having to use external services like url shorteners or image hosting sites.

We’re happy to announce that Flowr was selected as one of the 20 finalists for the mini-Seedcamp Zagreb. We’ve heard so many good things about it, from previous Seedcamp participants and mentors, that we can’t wait to pitch our idea to a room full of smart entrepreneurs and investors.

To go together with our gradual opening of the service, we’ve also prepared a short screencast that presents basics of Flowr and how it can help your team

Seth Godin describes in his book Tribes that one of the problems with old type of organizations is that communication happens top-down or bottom up but not sideways: between coworkers and team members. It’s easy to write a memo to your boss and wait a month or so for a response and hoping that your ideas might happen at some point in the future.

Here at Flowr we think that there is a better way to work together. We talk a lot about Real-Time Collaboration which is one of the ways for an organization to encourage talking sideways. Encouraging everyone to share as much as they can and to share their progress, ideas and ask questions out in the open is a basic building block of new type of organization. One that then takes this knowledge and empowers its workers with tools analyze ideas and connect with each other. The biggest changes come from people from different departments that are passionate about similar ideas and have not discovered that they can form their own tribe around it.

It’s not about technology but about building tools that empower you to work together at creating new, bigger ideas that might never happen otherwise.

After many months of development we’re happy to announce that we’ve started opening Flowr to the interested teams that would like to improve the way they collaborate.

This is a preview release which means:

• it’s still rough around the edges, but it works overall
• we’re still testing out many concepts so things like interaction and user interface will change
• we expect you to give us feedback so we can make it even better
• no matter what, we’ll ensure that you will always be able to get to your data

Preview release is completely free with all the features and we won’t forget our tester friends as we introduce premium offerings. If you are still interested, let us know by emailing to team@theflowr.com the following information:

• number of participants in your Flowr network
• primary language that you use to communicate inside your group

To get a better feel for Flowr, here is a screenshot of our internal Flowr:

Essence of Flowr is in sharing and collaborating with your team. A big part of this is research on the topic and sharing links with your Flowr group. To make this process easier we’ve designed a Bookmarklet that will allow you publish directly into your Flowr stream or to a specific group.

Until we release our Flowr Toolbox, you can get it by visiting:

http://{your flowr network name}.theflowr.com/bookmarklet