A bunch of news on the Haystack front. In addition to moving to a new infrastructure provider, have put in a load of new capabilities. The most notable two are:
Profile Permalinks
We realized that, if businesses are going to be using the system to enable customers to find the “right” person to help them from within an organization, organizational representatives need to be as visible as possible. So, in addition to finding individuals via the Haystack tag navigation, profiles are now permalinked and, therefore, discoverable via the big search engines. This also means that you can put a link to your Haystack profile in your email signature, or even link to it from a webpage. Or even from within a blog post.
Example: Permalinks to Dennis Howlett, Denise Ryan and Andrew Taylor.
And check this…the Google visibility rocks.
Private Haystacks
We’ve had a number of customers come to us and say “I love what you’re doing…can we use this just ourselves, and not make the profiles visible?” The answer is now yes. So, Shel Holtz writes the following about “enterprise social networking” behind the firewall.
Shel: “To me, [enterprise social networking] means within the organization. I am convinced that there is tremendous potential in an all-internal social networking platform for large organizations that lets employees get knowledge and information, and make connections, among themselves.”
There you go, Mr. Holtz. Any Haystack administrator can now choose to make his or her Haystack “private,” and only allow visibility to those who are in the network. The Haystack itself doesn’t even show up in the directory. Done. Next?