We’ve recently watched as companies like Jive and Salesforce.com have shifted focus to become platform-centric companies. Social software, CRM and other products are becoming less important than platform-as-service and enterprise app stores for many companies. But what’s going to run on these platforms?
“We don’t want to be the Facebook of the enterprise, we want to be the Zynga,” says co-CEO of Rypple Daniel Debow. Considering the role gamification is playing in Rypple’s development, he may mean that in more way than one. Rypple is a software-as-a-service for employee feedback. Staff can give each other feedback and managers can coach their employees and manage goals.
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Today Rypple announced Rypple 3.0, which gives users the ability to create custom badges and, more importantly, define what they mean. We’ve been critical of game mechanics in the workplace in the past, and, personally, I’m not a fan of badges. But Debow makes a good point about the meaning of badges.
“If I show you a little ribbon with a little heart shaped thing on the end of it, you probably wouldn’t be impressed with it if you didn’t know what it was,” he says. “But if I told you that it was a Purple Ribbon and that it’s awarded to people who have been wounded in combat, then would you think it was important?” While the badges on Foursquare are fairly meaningless, a company could create actual meaningful badges earned for real accomplishments at work.
Debow told Robert Scoble that Rypple will soon be running on top of Yammer, and we expect to see it other places soon. Along with other innovative apps that focus on a single problem, such as Meetzi, Rypple is exactly the sort of company that should thrive in an app store environment.
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