Social Government

Plethora of Social Media Tools, but not Twitter, Launch with Apps.Gov

By Ethan Klapper on September 15th, 2009

Scribd, SlideShare and 19 other social media tools are featured on Apps.gov, the General Services Administration’s new government cloud computing Web site that launched today.

U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra announced the site, writing in a post on the White House Blog:

Apps.gov is an online storefront for federal agencies to quickly browse and purchase cloud-based IT services, for productivity, collaboration, and efficiency.

The social media tools not only carry the GSA’s blessing but will also be easy for agencies to deploy — two previously difficult-to-overcome barriers.

In the case of the Social Media Apps category — there are three other main categories on Apps.gov — the site serves more of a clearinghouse for agencies to “request” usage of the tools. Users are presented with a page that contains a link to each tool’s GSA Terms of Service and Agreement. This agreement was the big legal barrier that prevented so many of these tools from being available to agencies for so long.apps

In addition to the 21 tools that launched today, six other categories of tools will be launching in the future: Livecasting, Mashups, Opinions and product reviews, RSS and Other Syndicated Feeds, Virtual Worlds and Widget Creation.

In addition to the aforementioned document sharing services, integration with FriendFeed, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube also launched.

Notably absent is Twitter.

But my favorite service that launched is something called IdeaScale. IdeaScale is similar to Google Moderator, where agencies can crowdsource ideas. More popular ideas “bubble to the top,” its Web site says.

Sept. 15, 2009 will be a turning point in how government agencies use social media. Obviously, this site and its underlying regulatory approval took a while to develop. Keep up the good work.

In a related development, Google launched a government portal today. The popular Google Apps e-mail collaboration suite is set to launch next year for agencies.

P.S. Is it just me, or does Apps.gov seem to run on the slow side?

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  • Allison
    Twitter is widely used in government, and the reason it likely wasn't included on apps.gov is because GSA found that there was no problem with the Terms of Service for government, so no new terms were negotiated. This system is just a formal way of routing requests to the departmental points of contact who hold the Terms of Service for the department. While internal approvals for using Twitter would still be required (I would hope), I assume they didn't include it on apps.gov because that TOS piece is absent.
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