Being a native of New Jersey I have fond memories of the classic Jersey diner. The kind of place that had a 20 page book for a menu, that served everything from breakfast to burgers to seafood (generally a good
Flickr - wallyg idea to avoid diner shellfish) all the way to full roast turkey dinners. Throw in a generous helping of Greek, Italian, and even Mexican selections, and the customer likely had about 500 different items to choose from.
Someone not familiar with the New Jersey diner can get a bit overwhelmed and surprised with the sheer heft of the menu and almost dizzying array of choices. Page after page of choices, even at 3 AM.
Lately it seems like the options to the Human Resources Technology professional in the area of internal collaboration platforms is starting to resemble a Jersey diner menu. Every day I think another web-based solution to support employee collaboration, communication, improve productivity, and otherwise turn your organization into a high performing, 'social' organization. And while I generally agree that these kinds of solutions are really the future for collaboration for many organizations, the sheer number of solutions that are currently available have to be confusing and a bit daunting to the average HR professional.
A starting point for many investigating these solutions is the famous Gartner Magic Quadrant document. These documents attempt to give a relative ranking to a fairly large number of vendors in a given market, along with some basic information on the solution. The current Magic Quadrant for Social Software can be found here. But the problem with the Magic Quadrant is that its inclusion criteria skews towards the larger vendors, and consequently the ones that tend to sell to the larger customers.
The many, many start-ups and smaller vendors, (many offering fully functional collaboration platforms for very low costs, even free) are not included by Gartner, and are generally ignored by many other major analyst firms. So if you are an HR Pro at a company of say less than 500 employees, (which by the way outnumber firms larger than 500 employees by about 333-1), then you are pretty much on your own to navigate this complicated and ever expanding space.
Just in the last few months alone I have checked out (among others) Brainpark, GroupSwim, Sosius, Central Desktop, Obayoo, Socialcast, Injoos, Spinscape, Conenza, and Neighborhood America. All have interesting solutions, and all could be the right solution for a small business, but for the HR Pro, navigating this complex and crowded market has to seem kind of overwhelming. There are simply so many options and choices here that it can be difficult to determine just what solutions are best for a particular organization.
If you find yourself at the diner in Jersey the recommendation is easy, order a Taylor Ham, egg, and 
Flickr - feralboycheese on a hard roll, you won't be disappointed. If you are a small business looking for a new collaboration solution, well, order a Taylor Ham, egg, and cheese on a hard roll, and be prepared for quite a bit of research and exploration.