Twitter as Social Computer
Sam Lawrence just posted an article about Twitter and social computing. Sam notes that people are learning interesting information and getting questions answered by tapping their public social network. Inside the enterprise, however, most of us are stuck using legacy tools that aren’t as effective. Couldn’t Twitter — or something like it — help companies communicate internally?
We certainly think so. As we noted in small cloud theory, there’s no reason why the same tools that work on the Internet couldn’t work on the corporate intranet. In some ways, it should be easier to network within a company than outside it. After all, as Sam points out, folks in an organization have — by definition — shared goals and common interests. So in a sense your social network is already built for you.
Twitter’s intuitive minimalism, like Google search, means that it’s easy to learn and understand. Compared to most of the other software used at work, it’s a breeze to use. No training required. No change management. And right now, it costs nothing to support. From an enterprise IT perspective, you couldn’t ask for a better deal.
The only barrier to Twitter adoption within the organization is the fact that not everyone has adopted it yet. Which means that progressive E2.0 types still need to use traditional channels, like email, to communicate with folks that haven’t begun using it yet. Which means the IT folks still need to provision email to every employee. It’s self-reinforcing; Email’s killer feature is ubiquity. And email is ubiquitous because everyone has it.
And it’s not entirely clear whether Twitter could succeed as a ubiquitous tool. Twitter is a really noisy communications channel. (Hence its name.) The last thing most knowledge workers need is another distracting communications mechanism. Email is bad enough. Hugh MacLeod just permanently disappeared from our twitter stream, because he figured he had better things to do.
Part of what makes Twitter work today is the fact that it’s an opt-in social medium. You sign yourself up. You choose whom to follow. If the IT folks signed you up for an account and automatically subscribed you to all 500 coworkers, would its utility collapse? Not everyone is @scobelizer.
The folks at Twitter have two related challenges to solve before they have a truly enterprise ready system. They’ve got to figure out how to scale the system technically as well as scale the system socially.
As a startup in the social productivity space, we know how hard it is to get the social design right. Twitter’s done a great job of social design so far. We wish them the best of luck.
Darn. While I was writing this post, another 40 tweets came in.
Simon Dugard said,
Wrote on April 10, 2008 @ 10:48 pm
One thing I think you miss about Twitter is that in a social world, people are more comfortable asking questions. One large barrier I can see to something like Twitter in a corporate world is that people don’t want to seem stupid to their boss and their co-workers.
Gordon said,
Wrote on April 11, 2008 @ 9:06 am
That’s a really good point.
One of the things I love about Twitter is that it’s so light and fluffy - I almost never ‘compose’ a tweet - just blurt out random stuff.
If my professional performance was judged by the quality of my tweets, then maybe Twitter would become less useful. The Candidness is part of the goodness.
The other thing that Twitter does is ditch the politics of “Which person gets on the TO/CC/BCC Lines”.
I think that’s a good thing…