Phuser launch first Web 2.0 integration, needs work

UK startup Phuser have launched their first Web 2.0 integrations with Slideshare and del.icio.us for sharing slideshows and social bookmarks. You can now use these other services inside Phuser privately between a team without having to create a new account with those services. Unfortunately, on trying it out, I found the integration to be still somewhat buggy, which I should imagine they are working on right now. That doesn’t mean that their strategic trajectory – towards a kind of mashup of other Web 2.0 services and applications – via hooking into APIs – is invalid, but I think it’s going to be tricky to execute the right kind of interface to all these services. There is clearly still a gap between expectation and execution.

But the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ space is still the best direction for Phuser to take, after ditching its consumer-facing model. Huddle, a UK enterprise 2.0 startup, recently announced it had raised $4m in a Series A funding round from VCs Eden Ventures, proving that there is appetite amongst VCs for this stuff. Other players in this space include Basecamp, Wrike and Goplan.

And I now see some businesses are seriously trying to use Facebook as an Enterprise space, which seems utterly stupid given Facebook’s draconian terms and conditions which give it rights of all content inside the network. Broadstuff notes that a company called Serena found its existing intranet was a poor platform for document finding, much less sharing, hence the Facebook move. So why did they do it?

In essence, Web 2.0 functionality is very useful in Enterprise systems, traditional B2B suppliers don’t have it, so you have to go to B2C platforms.

To explain this thinking, here’s Phuser’s slideshow:

SlideShare | View | Upload your own

So in theory companies like Phuser could do well if they can offer those B2C Web 2.0 applications in an enterprise context. I don’t want to be too hard on a two-man startup, but they just need to execute better and build that brand…