Enterprise social networking applications facilitate, capture and organize open conversations and information sharing between individual workers and groups within an organization. In addition to capabilities that support conversations and information sharing, they can keep track of the network of relationships between participants (via social graphs), in order to deliver a personalized stream of updates about events or conversations to individuals (via news feeds and activity streams). These applications help people find out about each other, have discussions, share information and generally interact. Interaction occurs either at a one-to-one level, or in groups, teams, communities and networks, and in the context of structured or unstructured business activities.
The market for social software in the workplace includes software products that support people working together in teams, communities or networks. These products can be tailored to support a variety of collaborative activities. Buyers are looking for virtual environments that can engage participants to create, organize and share information, and encourage them to find, connect and interact with each other. Business use of these products ranges from project coordination within small teams or homogeneous groups, to information exchange between employees across an entire organization.