One giant step for microblogging

A lot of coverage for Twitter lately - one of the leading microblogging systems - and rightly so. While people prevaricate about Facebook-style options for the enterprise, microblogging is making progress and should appear on more corporate radars soon.

Does it have a future? Google thinks so, and has bought microblogging system Jaiku.

Hopefully, this will increase awareness about the potential of microblogging in the enterprise. Not just in an emergency, but in everyday business life.

Microblogging provides straightforward communication to employees through mobile phones, PDAs or a computer. So that covers most staff.

More so than other social media systems, microblogging offers internet human buzz, not least because systems such as Twitter and Jaiku are simply chat rooms with the "permanence of blogs and the spontenaiety of IM and text messaging". And it doesn't have to be a text update - it could be a recorded message, and include a link to more information.

Scoble talked recently about how Twitter fits into the flow of information, and increasingly microblogging is the start point of many conversations. With Google helping to legitimise microblogging, maybe more enterprises will start to talk about it too.