I have an on-and-off kind of interaction with twitter. There are days when i am online most of the day, and there are days, when i just dont login. I wonder why. But, this gets me wondering ... What is twitter all about? I mean, i understand twitter from the perspective we are familiar with, but given my interactions with twitter, i am wondering ... what are the implications of a twitter within the organization. And this is something i havent been able to figure out.
There is lots written about the value of a twitter-like tool within the firewall, but i am thinking ... lets look at it simply. Twitter is a platform which lets you write short messages about whatever it is that you want to write, and your friends to follow those messages, and comment on them, if they like. The 140 character limit is quite nice ... stops people like me from ranting on and on. But, having said that, there is the other aspect of this ... the volume. There are so many activities people do. Which is why, oftentimes i find some kind of overload from twitter ... theres just too many tweets to go through. Which is actually nice the way i am using twitter today, but if you were to replace your connections on twitter with your colleagues at work, would you be so keen? Maybe ... or then, maybe not.
There is also the idea that by following what your colleagues are doing, you yourself can learn a bit. Colleague reading a blog? If they tweet about it, you could get to know about an interesting blog, which you might find helpful at work. But then, looking at it from a different perspective, how about social networking? Wouldnt a social networking platform do just about something similar? With the additional functionality for building your social networks, and interacting with people as they go about their day-to-day work? In other words, what about social networking (aka facebook) as an aggregator for the activities that people are doing? There is definitely an overlap here, though i tend to believe that maybe a facebook is something which i find easier to interact with, because it brings in a more social aspect to the interactions. And if one could link up a corporate facebook with some of the other systems, it could actually be an interesting concept.
I have posted a poll to find out what you think ... care to post your comments? Look forward to hearing.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Twitter ...
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1 comment:
Hi Atul,
Its been a long while since I have heard from you ! Hope all is well at your end. I have just started using Twitter and I find it great to learn about what others are doing especially since a lot of experts and thought leaders in various areas are present. I feel the greatest asset that Twitter bring is the 140 - 160 character limit for a tweet as this makes the application very sticky as people can easily post short tweets.
In the organizational context, I am not sure how a micro blogging application like Twitter would work. I still feel a good conventional Social Networking application will suffice for the needs in the office. Probably the only workforce that could really use Twitter would be the field / sales force especially during travel and customer meet times. yet to discover how an org can use a Twitter like application
Regards,
Mark
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