Socialcast announced some major additions to it’s microblogging platform today. It’s only been two months since the company scored a  major coup by luring Facebook’s Activity Stream Architect Monica Keller to the company, but with support for the Open Graph Protocol and HTML5′s microdata formats, her fingerprints can already be seen on this release.

Reach essentially describes the major new feature of Socialcast, which is the ability to embed microblog conversations in external systems that still appear in the main home stream. For example you can embed a discussion into an internal HR page on sick time. That discussion will exist in context forever on that page, but the comments will also appear in the organization-wide stream along with a reference to where it came from (perhaps an icon of your intranet). The company has plugins today for Google Apps Gmail, Microsoft Outlook (2003, 2007, 2010), Lotus Notes, and Salesforce.com. But the potential is limitless.

Socialcast Reach includes what is essentially a wizard for making Socialcast discussion widgets. You choose parameters, such as the need for authentication, and some behaviors and settings, and then embed a short snippet of code into your desired page. In addition the plugins that are available today, this capability will let you embed the discussion, stream, and/or “Like” button pretty much anywhere. In addition, the company says that you can utilize REST to programmatically create or respond to messages. I can envision typing “When is Bill Smith available to meet today?” and a system looking at his calendar to respond automatically with Bill’s next available meeting time.

Why Is This Important?

For all the talk about enabling social businesses, microblogging is really just another data silo. Socialcast Reach is taking the conversation out into specific operational systems in the enterprise. People in the organization can comment on those operational conversations in the main company stream as well. In general getting adoption of social systems in the enterprise is an uphill battle. Using reach in more transaction-oriented systems may be a lead in to bringing larger amounts of people into the conversation, paying more attention to the entire company ecosystem.

Reach is being launched today, so it remains to be seen how people will utilize it and if they will fully take advantage of things like the Open Graph Protocol. But this is an important and exciting step forward.