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Google has unveiled a new-age communication and collaboration tool

threaded conversations between multiple users

online application

At the same time, a recent InformationWeek survey of IT departments are showing considerably wariness for doing the same thing inside the firewall with employees, with over half being either skeptical or wary of the utility of Web 2.0 apps in the enterprise.  The biggest concerns: Security, little expertise with Web 2.0 products, integration issues, and unclear ROI top the list.  In other words, the group inside most organizations that's most familiar with IT and software, is thinking carefully before deploying things like Enterprise 2.0. This is an interesting contrast, with a growing list of companies cautiously but clearly testing out the Web 2.0 waters with their customers while remaining largely on the fence for its use inside the enterprise.  Certainly, many organizations likely believe that consumer facing sites that extensively leverage user generated content, mass participation, and social networking have been proved to work on a large scale by sites like MySpace and YouTube.  And that organizations have already purchased and deployed countless IT tools that were already designed support internal business processes, ad hoc collaboration, and information capture and storage.    Another probably contributor to the increasing use of customer-facing Web 2.0 applications by large organizations is simple competitive pressure.  This is something that IT departments have only recently started facing in a serious fashion with outsourcing and other budget diversions in the enterprise as business units decide that they can do better by pitting their internal IT suppliers with external ones.  Thus, because of industry competition, a company's external products tend to improve faster and be more innovative since the concern over the displacement and dislocation of falling behind one's competitive peers is often pronounced in many industries.  Competition is usually much less, and often non-existent, for internal IT products.

it doesn't help us understand if Web 2.0 concepts like crowdsourcing actually work well in the enterprise.  For one thing, instead of recruiting people who have previously had no relationship with you and cost-effectively aggregating their time together to create large levels of new output, employers have a zero-sum game with Web 2.0 inside the firewall.

the best that Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 applications like blogs and wikis can do it increase the productivity of existing business processes by improving efficiency as well as allowing them to self-improve through emergent structure and behavior.

For many of us, a piece of chalk represents a time in our lives when anything was possible. A time when we were learning, building, communicating and most importantly - having fun. So when we decided to create a great collaborative web application, it seemed like the perfect name. However, like back in school, our imaginations started to run rampant with ideas. It didn't take long for us to realize what we really wanted. Something that takes us back - not to the classroom or playground, but to a world where we can create and collaborate freely, with friends, colleagues or even strangers. Designers, programmers, writers, family, friends - anyone. We all want tools that make us more productive, especially when we're working in groups. Chalk gives any team an immediate, real time collaborative environment thats accessible from any computer in the world. Do you want to share your ideas, code or graphics instantaneously with others? Chalk is already changing the way we work, and we're sure it will for you. Oh, and did we mention Web 2.0 yet? Chalk communication is in real time, powered by the excellent Ruby on Rails and AJAX, and it's fully compatible with Internet Explorer 5+, Firefox, OmniWeb and Safari. Not to mention the excellent social features we're still adding such as buddy lists, instant messaging and even entire community hub - all without a single page refresh and just a mouse click away. The end product is almost ready. We've come a long way in a short time, but we're about to graduate (hopefully with honors!). We hope you'll be there at the ceremony so you can take Chalk for a test drive. Until then, sit tight and tell your friends - after all, thats what Chalk is all about, sharing.

It’s instant messaging with a group. You post a short message via IM, web or other utility (see below) and other Twitterers who are “following” you will see your message. Some have called Twitter a form of microblogging

You can add your friends cell phone numbers by sending an IM to the twitter@twitter.com contact and typing: add CELLNUMBER (where CELLNUMBER is their number)

you might only want to get particular types of news pushed at you