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Socialwok.com - a social networking serviceSocialwok (www.socialwok.com) is a free web-service that provides a closed social network for business use. It resembles a stripped down Facebook or LinkedIn homepage instead of an actual intranet and hence functions as an communications tool instead of a complete environment such as Microsoft Office Sharepoint.
The service is suited best for providing an addition to the traditional company intranet that usually consists mainly of shared drives, replacing email-based communications and workgroup based collaboration suites.
 What can Socialwok be used for?Socialwok allows people in the organization to publish status updates, links etc. that are visible only internally. The service adheres to the appearance of simplicity familiar from Google products and should require zero learning curve. Status updates allows for both personal updates and shared news feeds. For example, Project XYZ could have a feed to which the users could post to and which would tie all those matters, related to Project XYZ, together.
 Each feed and status update has the following traits or options:
Furthermore, each update can consist of the following attachments, which is a slightly misleading name from the e-mail convention of "physically" attaching files:
Best of all, you can add multiple attachments of different types to the update, e.g. a note and location. Unfortunately you currently can't add more than one attachment of the same type, which typically would mean multiple links with previews.
You can follow not only a feed but a person as well, just like you can in Twitter and you can search all your Google Applications from a single search box instead of logging into each one separately.
Last but not least, the status updates can be published. Once created, the update can be published as a Twitter tweet and as a Facebook status update (usually through a Fan page). The options for FriendFeed and LinkedIn are already visible, but as of today can't be used yet.
Organizing and searching the contentThe title above is slightly misleading since there's no need to organize content, except by posting it to the correct feed when applicable, it's done automatically. Status updates are organized chronologically within their relevant feeds (personal or chosen feed).
You have the option to browse and search content either through the Gmail gadget explained below, the search box and through the browse link in the upper-right corner of the Socialwok page. The search feature is very powerful as it allows for searching of all your Google Apps content.
In the browsing window the content can be browsed by:
 Further enhancements to the basic serviceSocialwok has been developed on the Google App Engine platform, which explains the tight integration options with Google Apps such as Google Docs.
The team behind Socialwok have pushed the integration concept further with Gmail integration, a installable Gadget (a kind of Google widget or mini-application) in your Gmail page which provides a couple of interesting perks:
 Mobile useIf you possess an Android phone or an iPhone you can use the service directly from your mobile phone.
To choose or not to choose Socialwok?Socialwok basically has two main strengths:
In accordance the service is suitable for use in an working environment where there are non-technical users who dislike learning new software or in an organisation that uses the Google Apps extensively. The latter is important since you can link directly to Google Docs content without making it public or uploading it as saved files.
I wouldn't suggest this product to organisations that:
The first and second bullets deserve the most attention. Socialwok is not intended to be a file storage replacement even though the storage limits haven't been published anywhere that I could find. Similarly membership in feeds is a simple yes or no question, there are no advanced options such as that a user could read but not write to a feed.
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