Atlassian announced Confluence 4.0 today and with it officially recognized the “@” symbol for notifications in its collaborative service. That may not be the most significant new feature for the Atlassian product but it is noteworthy as an overall trend that is emerging in the enterprise and an example of the difficulties in  adding social features to already established applications.

The @ symbol represents the rise of the activity stream, now the information cortex for the digital enterprise. It has emerged as a standard form of communication in a river of news format, most often  associated with services such as Twitter.

But with Confluence, it’s a bit different. Confluence is a wiki. The @mentions are used to notify people about content and conversations.  It is buillt into the application

It is distinctly different than the Confluence activity stream gadget, which does not have an @mention feature.  The gadget is not core to Confluence. It is an add-on.

The @mention feature differs with a service such as Yammer that integrates the mention in a unique activity stream that flows down the page. Socialtext is a collaboration platform that is built on a wiki with an activity stream called Signals that also uses a river of news style.

Is this a major flaw in Confluence? I think not. Confluence is a collaboration technology designed primarily for project management with technical teams.  It integrates with Jira, the Atlassian project management application.  It is designed to help teams collaboratively develop technical docs, intranets, and knowledge bases.  The search is robust.

The Confluence update is comprehensive. The team has simplified the editor with the capability to drag and drop photos into the wiki. It has new auto formatting and autocomplete features.

Services Angle

Integrating activity streams into existing applications is a devilish task when the feature is not built in natively. It requires users to weave in gadgets and third-party applications. But it’s the bones of a service that matters. And that is what defines Confluence. Its overall infrastructure is sound and the features sets are rich. It’s affordable and trusted thousands of customers.

Activity streams are important but the trick is how to build them into the flow of an application. Confluence takes a simple approach. They are not overdoing it. And for the user, that may be just all they need for the work they need to do.