Twitter, the fad and the potential

Twitter is an increasingly popular web service that allows people to track what other people are doing. Everyone seems to be talking about it and I’ve read of many people adopting it. I, on the other hand, visited the site for the first time today – not to sign up mind you, just to snag the logo for this post.

So why hasn’t an early adopter like myself adopted such a popular service? Well – I don’t see much value in a personal push system of letting everyone know what I am doing. Frankly, I don’t want everyone to know what I am doing.

Beyond that it seems to be creating a lot of noise that I really just don’t care about. If you hang out at the twitter home page and refresh every 30 seconds or so you will see exactly what I mean. Check out these screens

Granted, I don’t know these people but if I did I still don’t think I’d care. If I want to know what someone is doing, I’ll call them or send them a text message. And vice versa if they want to know what I am doing. It should be a pull system – not push.

Criticisms aside, there is a heap of potential for a service like this in the corporate world. We’ve seen RSS rise as an information delivery mechanism that greatly complements e-mail and, in my opinion, will help to create more value to e-mail.

Twitter, or a like-minded service, and the value it can add to calendar/appointment/notification services is analagous to the complementary relationship between RSS and e-mail. For instance instead of a co-worker calling me, IM’ing me, checking my shared calendar, or walking over to my desk – they can simply check my internal twitter to see that I had to run to the post office.

In this sense the push system provides a clear, effective, and efficient message. I don’t have to notify my coworkers I am stepping out of the office – and they don’t have to try several different avenues to find out what I am doing.

Also, in a corporate environment the noise produced by such a service will inherently be reduced. There won’t be messages like ‘i like random characters’ or ‘bite my tounge… bite my tounge’. Messages will be more clear and concise, but more importantly helpful and effective – like ‘ran to the post office’ or ‘out to lunch brb’.

It almost makes me want to create a copycat platform to target the enterprise. Ideas, ideas, ideas….

Tags: twitter

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