And to put a different spin on James’ complaint, enterprise Twitter is the saviour of enterprise email, because it takes a lot of the short message traffic out of email, including, probably a lot of the “noise,” be it short, stupid, insipid social grooming, or departmental lunch announcements.

Twitter is just a better place for “X is going on in 20 mins time in Building Y.” Especially if you can reinforce the norm that Tweets are transitory. That was one great value of zephyr, there was no searchable archive, so that kept the channel “instant.”

My fear in enterprising it, is that it would mimic how it is often used in its broad application. Plus, I think it becomes a presentation issue for a lot of organizations.

For example, at my post-sec, there is no one intranet, but a series of disconnected web sites and then a bunch of stuff built on Lotus/Domino (don’t start me on that :-), so providing an easy-to-access place for people to be aware of group tweets might prove challenging.

I’m not sure you could count on standard users to set themselves up easily to receive tweets.

BTW, ever thought of allowing subscriptions to comments? I just happened to check back today because I like a lot of what you write about …

Cheers;
j

Great post! (I love the look of the new blog, fyi). I have written a quick response on the Workstreamer.com/blog and will ping you offline. You’re touching on some hugely important stuff that we’ve been working on. Cheers!

Sam

The reason I think an enterprise Twitter works is because it doesn’t require extensive mental modeling. Twitter has two elements – the sender and message, a pattern that users have mastered earlier.

To the context question, this is where I think Twitter excels. I’ve written about socially shared cognition – how I think that Twitter users are figuring out the rules and context through use. Instead of front-loading users with rules, the enterprise Twitter could be a simple, free space, one in which the “rules” are figured out inside of networks.

Some networks inside a company might only Tweet about research or interesting links, others might just Tweet about their lunches. As long as their tweets are within the norms of the group, then that’s fine. And I might argue that almost all conversation is good in the context of a enterprise Twitter.

What really gets me excited is that, unlike other enterprise products, the Twitter doesn’t require rules, training, or a complex roll-out. You’d just drop it in, and let the community start sorting it out.