Convofy: Like a Private Facebook for Your Business

(MoneyWatch)  Facebook is fine -- great, even -- for marketing your business, but it's obviously not intended for business communications. And yet there's much about the social-networking site that would make for a great in-house communication tool: status updates, personal profiles, photo sharing, real-time chat, and so on.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could have a kind of private Facebook, a self-contained collaboration site that looks and works much the same way, but only for your business?

That's Convofy in a nutshell. Although its creators might not like the designation, Convofy is essentially Facebook for businesses. Check out the overview video, then meet me after for some thoughts.


As you can see, Convofy places a strong emphasis on collaboration, especially for Office documents, Web pages, images and PDFs, and the like. If all you're looking for is communication (chat, status updates, etc.), you might be better off with something like Yammer (another "private social network for your company").

Convofy's features include status updates, file sharing (with unlimited storage), to-do list and milestone management, chat rooms, and the cool-but-also-scary-sounding motivational analytics: "The size of the presence bubble tells how actively your coworkers are contributing in to the system." There are mobile apps as well.

To get started with the service, you need an actual company e-mail address -- Gmail and the like won't do. Alas, that leaves me out, so I can't give you any firsthand feedback just yet. (Based on what I've seen, however, I think there's major potential here.) If you've had a chance to try Convofy yourself, by all means hit the comments and let us know what you think of it.

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