More on Twitter and Why It is Good for You and Your Enterprise

I have gotten a number of comments from twitter defenders on my Fast Forward blog post on it, Twitter Enters the Enterprise? Here I raised some questions about Twitter in response to Serrin’s HiveTalk blog post, 7 enterprise uses for Twitter. It seems to be somewhere between IM or text messaging and blogs. It has the permanence of blogs and the spontenaiety of IM and text messaging.

Luis Suarez, an IBM KM consultant, provided his 10 Reasons Why Twitter Will Help Improve Your Already Existing Social Networks. He discusses the increased connectivity that Twitter offers for those who want to be very connected such as project teams. This includes Presence indicators, the ability for quick exchanges, and a record of interactions. Luis writes that you obtain and increased sense of community. He also uses it as a micro-blog to quickly put out ideas that he later covers in more depth on his blog. All of this makes sense.

John Tropea offers his thoughts on Twitter for business and presence social network. I like his comparison of blogs and twitter. John wrote, “blogging is about announcing, communicating, sharing, productivity, there is lots about how this benefits the enterprise. Twitter is a micro-blogging network, so it’s a bit different has you can only share brief content, so it’s more about location, presence, status, updates…
I see this as very useful especially for business travel or for people who are never at their desk, or I suppose for geographically spread teams.”

Jack Vinson pointed to Nancy White’s wiki that is collecting twitter stories. Many of these are similar to what John and Luis wrote. Twitter increases connections and serves as a virtual water cooler. It provides instant collaboration and opportunities for serendipitous discovery. You can get instant tech support, conduct informal research, and share documents.

Berkay Mollamustafaoglu wrote about a twitter like tool, RapidInformer, that is designed to make the twitter concept better adapted for enterprise use.