ESME, the Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment has released a sneak preview video.  Quite honestly, it looks amazing.  A twitter style messaging application for the enterprise with common sense functionality like groups and tag clouds.  I have seen quite a bit of conversation from Abesh and Dennis Howlett regarding ESME and I look forward to trying it out and seeing it in the flesh.

Looking at the blog that Dennis Howlett wrote about ESME, his observations of the development process to date and the community:

This team came together *because* of the community.

The people all ‘know’ each other from what they’ve seen contributed to the community.

There’s instant trust between all players, whether dev, BPX or business.

Stuff just gets done.

Business people can work successfully with BPX and developers when the ’story board’ of what’s needed is clear and where there’s a commonality of purpose.

There’s no internal pressure.

It’s seriously good fun.

There’s a lot of goodwill from those who have supported the project.

Much of the background knowledge needed to make the project feasible already exists inside the open community.

It’s all been done in people’s spare time but development proceeds very rapidly – at least so far.

Knowing some of the people involved with the project, I can see how all of the above makes complete sense.  Looking forward to seeing this out in the wild.  In the mean time, check out the video here.