Apples and oranges: Socialcast and tibbr

The other day one of my commenters asked:

What's the difference between Socialcast and tibbr?

I had a rough idea but not much of a clue, and decided to do a quick one. I commented back but there has been some considerable dustblowing going on, so I'll repeat that here and elaborate on it

Socialcast itself says, "Socialcast is a simple, secure, enterprise microblogging platform that helps employees easily connect and share in real-time."

I've never seen a demo from Socialcast so I have to go by the quick analysis, based on reading Socialcast's product page:

Reach Extension - pushing Socialcast conversations into apps. One-way too, it seems. What tibbr does: let the user subscribe to events and notifications from apps, and immediately follow-up within that same app from within tibbr

Activity Streams - pushing Socialcast conversations into apps, maybe even back, it seems

Analytics - seems to be the same what tibbr does

LDAP integration - Tibbr fully integrates with any corporate directory or LDAP, Socialcast announces being able to sync with LDAP v3 compatible systems

Outlook Connector - smart move to lure in those old-fashioned people who do everything by email. tibbr takes their own approach, letting you configure which events you want to (any) email (or phone). Whereas Socialcast uses Outlook to offer Socialcast via another medium, tibbr offers a few different media and levels and filters to give you even more control about events

Mobile Accessibility - iPhone, Blackberry and Android are supported for what looks to me a trimmed down version of Socialcast. tibbr offers full functionality on iPhone, Blackberry, Android and iPad

The remainder of Socialcast is identical to the above: enabling the sending of messages from Socialcast to others

Socialcast is indeed an enterprise microblogging system, like it claims to be. It mainly sends messages to other apps and devices, and some of those can send messages back. It's in fact email to public inboxes residing elsewhere, or conversation streams from outside Socialcast reaching into other applications

tibbr is an entirely different breed, and the two can't be compared at all. Where Socialcast tries to extend itself across as many "places" as possible, tibbr tries to tie all these "places" into tibbr, and vice versa. It's an inside-out view compared to an outside-in view: complete opposites at that level.
Where Socialcast sticks to messages produced by humans, tibbr let's pretty much anything generate messages or notifications and gives you full control about configuring those

Socialcast does a good job creating an enterprise-wide workfloor, whereas tibbr does a great job creating an enterprise-wide app that connects vice versa to any men and machines within it, and outside of it

Last try: for Socialcast, microblogging is a goal. For tibbr, it's only one of many means to reach the goal of real-time information and action at your fingertips

After I said this, Socialcast's former CEO Tim Young reached out to me. I was honoured to have a (even former) CEO single me out for an in-depth conversation about his product - I thought.
We had a very awkward conversation, in which he swung with the wrong bats. First, he told me that Socialcast had recently been acquired by VMWare, and VMWare had a much further reach than Tibco - yes and?
After that I was accused of having judged Socialcast without having used it - first of all that's what I said, second of all it wouldn't have changed anything about the general functionality and workings of Socialcast, would it?
To cut things short, he did offer to have a chat or call in 1 or 2 weeks and talk about the core. I politely declined - so far I hadn't heard that anything I said was wrong; Tim was only attempting to bury me in hundreds of thousands of customers, Fortune 500 lists, and many other things that were completely irrelevant

I don't know what it is why Tim wants to be bigger and better than tibbr, but it's a foolish attempt. Being a microblogging tool, best compare it to another microblogging tool. Pick e.g. Yammer, and Socialcast is much, much further advanced; even though it's twice as old, that's a good arm-length difference

So, here's my message to Tim again: