Technical issues can be overcome with appropriate coding solutions. Social issues require something else to drive them. If the business need (or value) of a corporate twitter application becomes more valuable, if it becomes a competitive advantage, then business will start using it. My current Business Objects client uses IM, for example. They support Microsoft’s Communicator product (not Messenger) and tend to frown on AIM but many folks still use it, especially across divisions. So IM has made inroads into the corporate world.

Twitter is sometimes called a microblog, but I can also see it as a delayed IM. Even if I’m not online right this minute, I can catch up with someones twitter feed when I do come back online. Some IM clients let me store offline messages for later delivery too. But twitter seems to be more generic in that my tweets just go out to anyone interested, and to nobody in particular. An IM conversation is dedicated to a specific person.

How is that an advantage? What happens if I am asking a question, and I ask the wrong person? If I send an IM or email to a co-worker and they don’t know the answer, nothing has been solved. If I send out a tweet, then anyone watching my feed that knows the answer can suggest a solution. It’s sort of like BOB, only the technical limitations keep the comments short and hopefully to the point. One of the developers summed up one of the advantages this way:

We can share ideas synchronously and asynchronously.

The concept of ESME (demonstrated at TechEd) was trying to put more of a corporate wrapper on twitter. I thought they did an interesting job. I don’t think I’ve posted a link to the project, so here it is:

http://www.esme.us/esme/

I don’t really know if I’m getting anything out of it, or ever will. Some considerations are:
I mainly write tweets to vent.
It doesn’t require as much time and energy as blogging.
Perhaps one day it will form part of some sort of online identity.
It could also possibly be a way to meet peers or to stay on top of BI related areas.
The missus is up to date on my whereabouts and movement (in combination with trackr.
et cetera

I was reading your post on how SAP was trying to incorporate these Web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it) in mainstream business applications. I reckon there won’t be a market for such products just yet. Perhaps in a couple of years time, if ever? What do you think?

Since you both are using it, a few questions if I may. Why do you use it? What value do you get out of it? Do you broadcast or just consume … meaning to you subscribe only, or do you also use twitter yourself?

I believe I signed up as “dave_rathbun” as the username, so David.Rathbun is not me.

[Edit] Aha. My current client doesn’t allow twitter via their proxy, so that area shows up blank for me when I’m at work. That was easy to figure out. [/Edit]