Twitter is a Web 2.0 entity – a combination of a website, background technical infrastructure, and human community – founded in late 2006 and already extremely popular. There are over 1.24 million known Twitterers as of today, according to the TwitDir directory service.
Twitter is a free service that lets members broadcast short text updates, known as ‘tweets.’ Tweets may be no longer than 140 characters, and can include links (free services like TinyURL and Snipurl are available to take very long URLs and shorten them so that they can be included within tweets).
Members can broadcast as many tweets as they like using any mixture of mobile phone text messaging, mobile phone client software like Twitterberry, desktop client software like twhirl, or the Twitter website.
And what happens to these tweets? Where do they go? Who reads them? Members use Twitter to sign up and receive the tweets of any and all other members who are of interest to them, a process known as ‘following.’ Extremely popular members such as Robert Scoble can have tens of thousands of followers, all of whom will see all of his public tweets. Newcomers to the service might have none, in which case their tweets will vanish into the ether, unconsumed by anyone. So Twitter communities are self-organizing.
And the tweets themselves are entirely freeform. The only restriction is the 140 character maximum; within that limit members are free to tweet away.
The service’s last major wrinkle is its interesting conflation of channels and platforms with person to person and group-level messaging. As I wrote earlier,
"Twitter currently lets users differentiate between standard public tweets, publicly-visible tweets that are replies to another user, and private replies (ones that are not visible to anyone except the recipient). They do so by prefacing their tweets with special characters: ‘@username‘ for public replies, and ‘d username’ for private ones (standard tweets have no prefacing characters). This is an elegant and lightweight way to differentiate among the three types of tweet; it lets users easily and quickly self-select which kind of message they’re sending."
In short, Twitter lets me send a message to another member in a way that’s visible to all of my followers. Why would I want to do this? At first I had no idea, and thought this was a bizarre and silly feature. But then I remembered learning about Facebook from some Harvard undergrads, and in particular their explanation of a similarly bizarre (to my eyes) feature: the Facebook wall , which is a portion of every member’s profile page where one of their friends can leave them a publicly visible message. The publicly visible part made no sense to me until the undergrads explained that it was the online equivalent of the whiteboards that lots of college students affix to their dorm room doors. As friends walk by they use the whiteboard to give love or give grief, leave updates, communicate meetup times and places, show off how clever they are, and do lots of other things that are person-to-person, but not private.
In my old-school way of looking at things channel technologies like email and SMS were for person-to-person communications, and platforms like blogs were for broadcasts to a group. But the Facebook wall showed me the limitations of that viewpoint, and showed me the benefits of moving non-private person-to-person communications from the channel to the platform, and thereby broadcasting them. These benefits include broadcasting who you know, what kinds of things you talk about with them (and so what kinds of things you’re interested in), what your interests and opinions are, where you’ll be and when (when you don’t mind the world knowing this information) and, in general, what kind of person you are. Private channels aren’t bad, and both Facebook and Twitter allow private communication via person-to-person channels, but both technologies encourage their users to do more publicly. Because of these two Web 2.0 entities, I’ve started to warm up to the idea of doing more (not yet most, but more) of my person-to-person communicating via public technology platforms. I feel that doing so opens up options — possibilities for further connections and interactions with interesting people — in a way that channel communications simply can’t. So while I sincerely doubt I’m ever going to live my whole digital life out in the open, I have come to see the value in living a bit more of it that way. So, evidently, has Scoble; as I look at his Tweetstream I see lots of public person-to-person messages.
As I wrote earlier, I think Twitter is a fantastic technology for enterprise purposes, especially if it lets users categorize their tweets so that they’re not just a single undifferentiated stream (as a number of people pointed out, hashtags are a current means of accomplishing this). An enterprise version of Twitter would let communities of practice, interest groups, and other collaborations quickly and easily self-organize, swap thoughts, and keep each other up to date. I’d expect that these collaborations would be based primarily around topics as opposed to around people, which makes the ability to categorize all the more important.
Imagine active and dynamic environments dedicated to ‘newproducts,’ ‘Q4sales,’ ‘HRpolicies,’ ‘ERPimplementation,’ ‘thecompetition,’ etc. in which employees were zipping their thoughts around to each other in way that was easy to monitor, consult, join, and participate in. Would this be a valuable complement to the other activities and conversations taking place within the enterprise? Your answer to this question, I think, reveals a lot about whether you think people should just keep their heads down and do the job that was assigned to them or lift their heads up once in a while and participate in the broader work of the organization. Do you believe that there’s a substantial ‘cognitive surplus‘ (to use Clay Shirky’ s great phrase) in your enterprise? If so, let the twitting begin.
I appreciate that this discussion might seem a bit abstract, and that twitting can be a hard thing to get your mind around. It certainly was for me, and for my MBA students. We had a Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 show and tell day this past semester, and one of my geekier (that’s a compliment) students tried to explain and demo Twitter. He was met with a lot of blank stares, even from my technophile class, and a lot of questions of the form "Uh…. why?" His best response was essentially "Look, you just have to try it yourself."
Look, you just have to try it yourself. I’m amcafee on Twitter, please feel free to follow. I’m not terribly active, but I do try to practice what I preach and learn about this technology by using it. If you’d like to join in, welcome!
One last reason why you should: it’s a dirt cheap and easy way to get feedback, and to get questions answered. As I was starting to think about this post, I broadcast the following tweet:
"What should I be sure to include in a blog post explaining Twitter & its biz applications to newbies?"
Among the responses I received were the following:
In my old-school way of looking at things channel technologies like email and SMS were for person-to-person communications, and platforms like blogs were for broadcasts to a group. But the Facebook wall showed me the limitations of that viewpoint, and showed me the benefits of moving non-private person-to-person communications from the channel to the platform, and thereby broadcasting them. These benefits include broadcasting who you know, what kinds of things you talk about with them (and so what kinds of things you’re interested in), what your interests and opinions are, where you’ll be and when (when you don’t mind the world knowing this information) and, in general, what kind of person you are. Private channels aren’t bad, and both Facebook and Twitter allow private communication via person-to-person channels, but both technologies encourage their users to do more publicly. Because of these two Web 2.0 entities, I’ve started to warm up to the idea of doing more (not yet most, but more) of my person-to-person communicating via public technology platforms. I feel that doing so opens up options — possibilities for further connections and interactions with interesting people — in a way that channel communications simply can’t. So while I sincerely doubt I’m ever going to live my whole digital life out in the open, I have come to see the value in living a bit more of it that way. So, evidently, has Scoble; as I look at his Tweetstream I see lots of public person-to-person messages.
As I wrote earlier, I think Twitter is a fantastic technology for enterprise purposes, especially if it lets users categorize their tweets so that they’re not just a single undifferentiated stream (as a number of people pointed out, hashtags are a current means of accomplishing this). An enterprise version of Twitter would let communities of practice, interest groups, and other collaborations quickly and easily self-organize, swap thoughts, and keep each other up to date. I’d expect that these collaborations would be based primarily around topics as opposed to around people, which makes the ability to categorize all the more important.
Imagine active and dynamic environments dedicated to ‘newproducts,’ ‘Q4sales,’ ‘HRpolicies,’ ‘ERPimplementation,’ ‘thecompetition,’ etc. in which employees were zipping their thoughts around to each other in way that was easy to monitor, consult, join, and participate in. Would this be a valuable complement to the other activities and conversations taking place within the enterprise? Your answer to this question, I think, reveals a lot about whether you think people should just keep their heads down and do the job that was assigned to them or lift their heads up once in a while and participate in the broader work of the organization. Do you believe that there’s a substantial ‘cognitive surplus‘ (to use Clay Shirky’ s great phrase) in your enterprise? If so, let the twitting begin.
I appreciate that this discussion might seem a bit abstract, and that twitting can be a hard thing to get your mind around. It certainly was for me, and for my MBA students. We had a Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 show and tell day this past semester, and one of my geekier (that’s a compliment) students tried to explain and demo Twitter. He was met with a lot of blank stares, even from my technophile class, and a lot of questions of the form "Uh…. why?" His best response was essentially "Look, you just have to try it yourself."
Look, you just have to try it yourself. I’m amcafee on Twitter, please feel free to follow. I’m not terribly active, but I do try to practice what I preach and learn about this technology by using it. If you’d like to join in, welcome!
One last reason why you should: it’s a dirt cheap and easy way to get feedback, and to get questions answered. As I was starting to think about this post, I broadcast the following tweet:
"What should I be sure to include in a blog post explaining Twitter & its biz applications to newbies?"
Among the responses I received were the following:
- davidvivero @AMcAfee Boils down to press release whispers: "psst, check this new feature out, or we just hired John D, or go read this review (URL)."
- a32b @AMcAfee …maybe mention in your Twitter post the business use of a public congratulation or dressing down.
- tuttlebn @amcafee Open ended questions to the cloud and expert seeking
- tuttlebn @amcafee Also good for informal conversations between executives that everyone can hear and respond to, as well as announcing breaking news
- pennyedwards @amcafee try explaining the value of informal snippets of information which quickly update people and don’t demand a response…
- smc90 @amcafee [re Twitter 4 newbies] some1 prob already rec’d this, but this my fave: http://snipurl.com/3c4cw [loove these Common Craft videos!]
- barrettjf @amcafee the importance of presence information to the enterprise. phys loc, proj status, time availability, means of contact, etc
- cb2206 @amcafee the best and easiest explanation of twitter is this one: http://tinyurl.com/5g7yml
- sradick @amcafee (retweet) – does an incredible job of connecting you to people you wouldn’t typically contact directly
- trib @amcafee my Twitter value story – have direct work and physically met >100 new people in US (I’m in Australia) thanks only to Twitter
- trib @amcafee seminal posts on Twitter from @pistachio http://is.gd/kp6 http://is.gd/AQv
- sunilnagaraj @amcafee allows visibility into organization’s stream of consciousness, ask Twuestion to org to find info/experts
- ITSinsider @amcafee Twitter unites communities. Teams succeed on collegiality. Collaboration hinges on trust and relevance– Twitter provides both.
- dshlac @amcafee Describe it as "micro-blogging" or "public IMing" that allows employees to easily tap into the collective wisdom of the enterprise.
- JoeSchueller @amcafee speed of request/response cycles
Not a bad return for 20 seconds work on my part…
What questions or comments do you have about enterprise use of Twitter? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.
{ 33 comments… read them below or add one }
Twittering in an enterprise will definitely improve inter-departmental transparency and remove duplication of work if the right people were following the right categories.
Twitter is a great way to share ideas and comments without having to invest a ton of time reviewing an entire blog post or article. It’s great for the busy bodies of the world : ). Personally, I am bigger fan of the linkedin platform.
You asked a question in a previous twit about favorite E2.0 case studies. How about a blog post about those responses?
I’m thrilled you’re engaging on Twitter and seeing the potential of microsharing within the enterprise. Before you joined, several of your posts on the power of loose ties and on the concentric circles and layers of connection between people in the enterprise made me thump my foot with excitement/impatience “he’s describing Twitter!”
(That’s how I accidentally crashed your blog during my Enterprise 2.0 talk. Ooops. Sorry!)
Two of my recent elaborations on the value of what I call “enterprise microsharing:”
1. Comment on Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior’s remarks about Twitter’s potential in the enterprise: http://pistachioconsulting.com/?p=252
2. Slides for the talk I gave at the recent Jive Software Enterprise UI/UX Summit: http://pistachioconsulting.com/?p=251
Warmly, Laura
PS – Naturally I’m sending people here to this post from my Twitter stream http://www.twitter.com/pistachio and will blog the post later. Compare the immediacy of that to older days when you mailed, faxed, emailed, newslettered or RSS-shared articles of interest to your network. Fast. Inobtrusive. Useful.
Twitter is great due to its simplicity. Why not learn from it to improve basic processes such as timesheet handling?
http://www.slideshare.net/remco123/timesheet-emotions-in-the-web-20-workplace-presentation
Regards,
remco
Prof. McAfee,
if a one has ever struggled with the problem that people who work on one floor never talk to people who work on another floor, even if they are working on the same thing, they have experienced the problem Twitter, blogs and others can solve.
Have you ever known an executives who has been surprised by skills they never knew an employee had or searched externally for a skill set someone working for them has but they never knew about? That is the benefit linking LinkedIn or some other social/professional tool offers.
How much money have businesses spent trying to link contextual understanding? That problem can be beautifully solved linking those LinkedIn to tweets/blog entries.
Software really will save the world…
Insightful post, as always.
There’s one minor inaccuracy: “Newcomers to the service might have [no followers], in which case their tweets will vanish into the ether, unconsumed by anyone.”
That’s not entirely true. There’s always the “Everyone” tab, which shows posts by (you guessed it) everyone. The posts fly by so quickly that it’s very unlikely anyone will ever notice you — assuming of course that anyone’s actually using the “Everyone” feature. I rarely ever use it and I doubt many people do, so it’s only one small tick above “vanishing into the ether.”
For large organizations, “enterprise twitter” would also probably suffer from so much information overload that nobody would use the “everyone” tab. But forcing people to follow others in order to filter tweets is not good enough for the enterprise. Hashtags aren’t that great either, because you have to remember to use them.
Enterprise twitter needs to have some kind of “group” functionality, which would be more like a Facebook wall plus following ability and the “@” replies feature.
On a completely different subject, I love the use of Twitter as an information gathering tool or “zeitgeist meter” if you will. If you garner enough followers, this can be really valuable. Some people call this the “lazy web” presumably because you’re asking others to do your research instead of doing it yourself on Google or Wikipedia or elsewhere. But I use it all the time, not only as a means of doing research but also to take advantage of the serendipity that lurks within my extended network of followers.
I look forward to seeing you at IC Enterprise 2.0!
As its quite obvious from “What should I be sure to include in a blog post explaining Twitter & its biz applications to newbies?” and it recieved quick feedback(s). In an enterprise you come across many matters to get feedback on. The best a person can give is where they feel comfortable, open mind yet on thier seats.
Also Sometimes it becomes hard to express in front of your boss when face to face.
Twitter is rising fast!
I made a twitter account the other day and already have a few followers and it is great for my business.
You said:
“Twitter is a free service that lets members broadcast short text updates, known as ‘tweets.Â’ Tweets may be no longer than 140 characters, and can include links (free services like TinyURL and Snipurl are available to take very long URLs and shorten them so that they can be included within tweets).”
I was actually wondering why was it the twitter was using tinyurl.com
Thanks for this post. More people and students should know more about this free service
José Felix :smirk:
We are a regulated electric utility – like your NStar … and I’ve received very positive feedback from media and customers from the Twitter feed I’ve begun.
Its simplicity is its most attractive feature to me. With my cell phone I can post a Tweet from anywhere. Info on power outages, etc can be communicated to my ‘followers’ quicker than my posting on our website (sigh…)
http://twitter.com/psnh
Normally I’m right there with you, cheering whatever you’re saying. But on this, I have some misgivings.
1) In my personal experience, Twitter has been incredibly valuable to connect me to my practitioner community *outside* the enterprise. I can’t do IM or personal Email from here, or Facebook, or a lot of other things, but I can keep up with a twitter feed on my Treo (or on NetVibes or Socialthing, etc). I’m not *expected* to keep up with this feed — I just want to because it’s there, a sort of lifeline to the outer world that’s just light-weight enough (keeping up with everyone’s blog, for instance, has proven to be impossible in the last 2 years). Now, if my company suddenly decided to run its own Twitter service, I assume I’d be *expected* to keep up with it, and that it’d be co-opted by official project work, management announcements, HR “news” items, and the like. (I think that’s a fair assumption.) Making it, essentially, just another corporate channel in a slightly different medium.
2) The fine-tuned/granular categorization you mention has my usability bells going off. Twitter has only a couple bits of syntax to remember – “d” and “@” (and maybe, for the meta-data nerds, the hash #). I suspect that’s nearly at the threshold for most people. Each additional proprietary tag (especially ones with more than one character, or ones that users feel they *must* use to have their messages received correctly) greatly reduces the likelihood that a user will even bother.
3) I suspect a great deal of the value companies can get from Twitter-like platforms is already happening with Twitter itself (on non-FailWhale days anyway). We’re already using Twitter among employees — a number of my coworkers follow one another. Having that space where we can be ourselves, disconnected from work, is a relief. There’s a tacit agreement that “what happens in Twitter stays there.” However, in addition to personal bits of text, we also share links, ideas, etc that are related to our work … not proprietary internal stuff, but things we learn or find inspiring online or at conferences. The beauty of this is that it’s a place where we, as coworkers, can intermingle with the community as a whole, outside company walls. Truly a ‘community of practice’ sort of behavior.
I’m not commenting this as an argument against your point at all, btw. But I know you like hearing from other points of view, so I’m offering it just as another data point
Keeping in the spirit of the 20 second effort I have not thought through this extensively (and I don’t use Twitter) but it seems that this is the same as a pretty old technology – Listserv.
Sure there is a limitation as to length of posts related to its use on portable viewers (mobile phones etc…) but it is basically the same old fashioned push technology with subscribable groups. Interestingly it’s my impression that Listservs are being more or less supplanted by forums (and previously BBS’s) in much of the enterprise space.
So I guess there might be something about these short messages that make them more interesting in a push type knowledge sharing model; or maybe most twitter users are simply too young to have ever had to deal with annoying listserv messages clogging up their emails; or maybe it’s nice to get an unexpected message from a friend when its not work related.
Anyway, I wonder if this will eventually move to a forum type format with RSS feeds where you choose when you read the messages your groups have sent out (shift from push to pull).
Just my 20 second worth (more or less).
Here is one tool to categorize Tweets.
http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/
Here’s an interesting site that just launched on Monday at TechCrunch50 and is attempting to tackle Twitter within the enterprise:
Yammer
Yammer has combined features from Twitter and Friendfeed and has added the ability to tag tweets (or are they “yams”?) similar to how you mentioned doing it in your post. They also allow businesses to pay to administer their company’s feed (revenue model).
‘ve been using Twitter.
After a bit over a week, I don’t have any interest at all any more of going to the trouble of smsing or logging updates about what I am doing. I hate typing with my thumbs. The day-to-day log of what I am doing aspect doesn’t hold much luster for me, personally. I also turned off the notifications from my friends on Twitter. Maybe if my son was old enough to be into it, I would follow him. But generally, I’m not interested in the donuts my friends eat or whether they are at work or at the park.
Where Twitter was very useful was as a way to let people know where they can find you, if you want to be found. I was just in SF for a weekend, where I have a lot of friends who don’t even know each other. I was twittering in what I was doing and where so that friends could find me if they wanted to. There were even a couple people who (gasp) don’t have cell phones, so it allowed me to message a lot of people all at once. I think of Twitter as sort of the most bare bones version of Dodgeball possible. I loved dodgeball, but couldn’t get my friends on board, and so never really used it. To follow me on Twitter you don’t need a phone, you don’t need to sign up. The simplicity is wonderful.
I think Twitter is perfect to improve communications within enterprises, particularly so in Asian countries. I’m from Singapore and I’ve worked in large government organizations. One of the main problems that we faced is that staff are often not forthcoming in their comments, especially in face to face conversations. This is asian culture. In contrast, most feedback we get is via written communication.
In talks and seminars, when discussions are opened up to the floor, most of the audience are more comfortable with writing questions on pieces of papers and submitting it to the moderator rather than using the floor mike directly.
Therefore, I think that micro-blogging via twitter will encourage more corporate discussions in Asian countries. I would even go as far as to say that it is the most important enterprise communication tool, as the text medium lends itself very well to Knowledge retention and Management.
I’m interested to hear any thoughts (if any) that people may have about using twitter in an educational setting. To my mind, it’s an excellent way to keep a connection to students outside of the 2 hours or so of lectures I have per week with a given class – to send tinyurls linking to blogs, sending updates about new postings on my website/blog (course slides, articles etc.) and generally keep the momentum going in the period between teaching in one week and seeing them again in the next.
The one problem holding me back from using at the moment is the fear that some students who may not be motivated enough to sign up to follow me on twitter would be somehow disadvantaged. I realise there is some personal responsibility required on the part of students here but the interaction is radically different from blogging where students can still access information close to exam time (and statistics from using Blackboard show that many of them leave it until late to register and download reading material). If they don’t sign up to Twitter, they could thepretically miss out on a lot of context.
Does anybody here have any experience with ‘Twitteducation’? Good/Bad/Indifferent?
I think Twitter is perfect to improve communications within enterprises, particularly so in Asian countries. I’m from Singapore and I’ve worked in large government organizations. One of the main problems that we faced is that staff are often not forthcoming in their comments, especially in face to face conversations. This is asian culture. In contrast, most feedback we get is via written communication.
In talks and seminars, when discussions are opened up to the floor, most of the audience are more comfortable with writing questions on pieces of papers and submitting it to the moderator rather than using the floor mike directly.
my sister and her friends keep talking about twitter, thanks for the great literature, it funny how young people are up to date on everything
Andrew,
Just a short note to thank you for this fantastic write up. I found it a great source of validation while we were developing Tweetworks.
Mike
100% true – the world we created and where we live is nothing else but a pure communication!
Wether it’s East or West the first media to connect human beings was text and it wasn’t replaced with other means yet due to its almost genetical imprint.
Way to Twitter! I would say, but with only one condition – do not drive communication to absurd as it’s shown on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALbH63Ali9U
I’m always using Twitter, be it in sharing ideas and thoughts…or sharing information and news. Twitter is really useful for me. I use my mobile phone to update my followers. Twitter is a great tool for busy people yet wanting to connect with the world.
So far so good far me, 5 months down the line.
thank you sir for the issue …
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How much money have businesses spent trying to link contextual understanding? That problem can be beautifully solved linking those LinkedIn to tweets/blog entries.
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I am on twitter….sharing my each bit….MY nokia 900 does this job for me..Its an awesome tool for busy people.!
I think that twitter is for lazy pople. It like stus in ICQ – by the way you can use ICQ now for posting in Twitter
now i use it for ?????????????? ??????????
Hi! Thanks for a very interesting post about Twitter! My friends and I use it every day and I think this post may be very interesting for them! I don’t think twitter is evil! It’s just part of nowadays world! I like it! And also like the best writing service.
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yeah i agree with this that twitter is the greatest way to share ideas and links. i also share some information about MCP Certification and some about CCDE Certification to you here.
Can anyone explain the real commercial value of Twitter as opposed to the social aspects?
Can anyone explain the real commercial value of Twitter as opposed to the social aspects?