What's all the Twittering About?

Last week, Tom and I attended the Intel Premier IT Professional seminar in Dallas. It was an interesting event and Intel still does things up right. Many companies have been cutting budgets over the last couple of years (for example, the nice breakfast buffets that we used to enjoy at the annual MVP Summit in Seattle had turned into a barely palatable egg sandwich in a sack last spring). Intel, on the other hand, set things up in the Belo Mansion and provided one of the best lunches I've had at one of these things, with a huge variety of yummy dishes in silver chafing dishes.

The first presentations were on topics you would expect: Intel's upcoming processor technology, virtualization, security and risk management. One session that was a little unexpected came from the company's "social media program manager" and it was about using "social computing" - Facebook, Twitter, and the like - in the corporate environment.

If you're like me, you might be wondering why a company would even allow these social networking tools on the corporate network, much less have personnel dedicated to managing them. But more and more these days, companies are adapting to the fact that their employees, especially younger ones, are probably going to use these applications anyway, so they may as well give them a way to do it in a manner that will enhance the company's image rather than detracting from it.

When you think about it, it's not so strange that technologies that started out as leisure time activities for consumers are finding their way into the business world. After all, the same thing happened with instant messaging. A few years ago, many businesses prohibited the use of IM and chat on the job, labeling it a time waster. But today many (if not most) companies use instant messaging for communications between co-workers and with clients, suppliers and partners.

An interesting phenomenon that was discussed is the "consumerization of IT." In years past, technology came first to the workplace and then eventually was adopted in the home. This was certain true of computers themselves, and of things like networking, laser printing, and high speed Internet connectivity. Now, however, many technologies begin as consumer products and then migrate to the corporate world. In fact, many people today have faster computers and more sophisticated software at home than they have at work.

In addition, the workplace itself is changing. More workers are mobile and many companies have telecommuters who work from home. Thus it's important to develop new ways to keep in touch with colleagues when you aren't sitting a few yards down the hall from them. Working at home is great - I've been doing it for over ten years now. Tom and I started our business in 1997. But a few months ago, Tom got a "real job," working for a consulting company in Seattle. In many ways, nothing changed. He still works out of the house here in Texas. But in other ways, he's now very much part of the corporate world, and his use of technology has changed as a consequence. He now has a schedule, a time when he has to be "at work," which means being available online. As a result, he's started to take advantage of applications that he didn't use much before.

One app that we're now discovering is Twitter. My dictionary defines the word as a verb that means "to utter a succession of small, tremulous sounds, as a bird" or "to talk lightly and rapidly, especially of trivial matters; to chatter, titter, giggle." Okay, that second one pretty much sums up how the Twitter service works.

Twitter began as a purely social tool that was billed as a real-time "micro blogging" service. The software lets you broadcast short text based messages (up to 140 characters) to groups of people simultaneously. The service now has several million users. Many of them are teenagers with nothing else to do but announce to their friends that they've arrived home from school or that they're going shopping now. But there are also many businesses, government agencies and other organizations that are beginning to use Twitter in various ways.

During the 2007 wildfires in California, the Los Angeles Fire Department used Twitter as a way to keep fire and rescue workers in the field updated on what was going on in the firefighting efforts. Cisco, Sun and other large companies use it to disseminate product information. Major Universities, including the University of Texas at San Antonio Engineering School, use the service to send announcements and information to students.

The price is right (it's free) and so far, doesn't sell advertising or produce revenue. It's apparently a "labor of love" that's backed by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, among others. However, One of Twitter's major attractions is that it's simple. To get an account, go to
Twitter

You can send Twitter messages via the web, IM or mobile texting and there are third party software applications that hook into it so that you can receive your Twitter messages in different ways. For example, there's a Google Desktop gadget and a Vista Sidebar gadget that pull updates from Twitter and/or let you make new posts. You can download many Twitter-related applications at
Twitter / Downloads

You can also link your Twitter account to your Facebook page so that your status updates are synchronized. By default, your messages will go on the "public timeline," where everybody with a Twitter account can read them, but there's an option to protect your updates so that only people you approve will receive your messages.

So how do you find people with whom you can "twitter?" When you sign up for an account, the service will search your web mail address book (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo) and if it finds email addresses that have accounts on Twitter, it will show you their messages (unless they've selected the "protect my updates" option). One thing that I immediately noticed was that my friends with Twitter accounts used it a lot for a few days or a few weeks and then there were no more twitters from them after that. It makes me think that, at least for most working adults, it's primarily a novelty and people quickly get tired of it and stop using it.

I can see how it could be useful in certain situations, but for day to day use, I just don't see it. I have a friend who thinks it's a good tool for distributing important information to emergency services workers out in the field, but I'm not so sure. It was designed for socializing, not for mission critical communications. I would worry about reliability - it has experienced outages, especially during popular tech events such as the 2008 MacWorld Expo. And when you're talking about having police officers, firefighters and EMS personnel broadcast information, I would worry about security, too. There's been at least one reported vulnerability that lets someone spoof a text message to Twitter.

As for the way most folks use it, I guess I just consider it a case of TMI or Too Much Information. Do I really need to know that you're about to take the dog for a walk, or that you're watching a rerun of JAG? I'm really not all that interested in that information even if you're someone I know, much less if you're a stranger. A glance at most of the messages on the Twitter site shows them to be, well, pretty boring.

But perhaps I'm just hopelessly old fashioned. Tell me what you think. Are Twitter and other "Social Web 2.0" tools the future of communications? Or is the popularity of Twitter's short-short messages just an indicator that Attention Deficit Disorder is running rampant in our society? Have I just not connected with the right Twitterers (I hate to call them "twits")? Do you think applications like this belong in the workplace, or is it just a case of companies trying to appear "cool" to woo Gen Y job candidates? Let us know your opinions