9 posts tagged “twitter”

With content, comment and communities increasingly distributed, it seems that Zuckerberg and co are doing all they can to attract the social media community together by turning Facebook into a single source of conversation.

Alongside a chat facility, Facebook has managed to commoditise Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us and such like into features on their system, as opposed to discreet systems in their own right. The Palo Alto group is also benefitting from a new application from Six Apart - Blog It - designed to broadcast content from Facebook to Tumblr, Twitter, Pownce, Vox et al.

Facebook fatigue was all the rage around the turn of the year, but these moves will be welcomed by many. All your social media are belong to us.

The developments brought to mind Tom Matrullo's recent great post An adjacency of opposites, in which he looks at Clare Hart’s and David Weinberger’s talks at FASTforward08. Hadley Reynolds highlights better than I could the relevant part of the post:

"For David, the core idea of his powerfully evoked image of 'the new front page' is that we have shifted the control of the structure of our information engagement from the owners of the content to ourselves as the community of users of the content."

And if Facebook is the new front page for social media and it's easier to start a conversation with many different communities simultaneously, then what happens next will prove interesting precisely because they are different communities.

"Sorry I wrote you such a long note, I didn't have time to write you a short one."

Never underestimate the value of brevity. What, says, B.L. Ochman can deliver the following benefits to a business:

• a major source of business news
• a quicker way to find out what's important today than my feed reader
• a place to find out what the people I'm interested in are finding interesting
• a source of live blogging from conferences and other events
• an excellent source of experts on various technical topics
• a place to build relationships through common interests
• direct access to many of my business heroes
• a place to (selectively) pimp my blog posts
• an international IM platform
• a place to take a break around the virtual water cooler
• a lot of fun

Answers on a you know what.

If you aren't sure, let CommonCraft tell it like only they can, and if you do know, maybe you think it's overhyped.

Update 11/04/08: Number 10 is at it - props to Rob Paterson/FastForward

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.

A week may be a long time in politics, but trying to keep up with the pace of change in social media is just as mad. Even as mid-size companies get to grips with Web2.0, and corporate blogging reaches a tipping point, up pops an interesting look at what the blog of the future could be like!

The pace of change can be seductive and/or discouraging, yet really understanding what can help you, how and how to do it is critical. A few luminaries have shone their torches recently on information about systems that should help when considering these key questions:

• Chris Brogan on Facebook
• Jeremiah Oywang on Twitter
• Bill Ives on Wikis

You might be waiting for all of separate systems to be fully integrated, easy to update and simple to find. Maybe you are waiting for Microsoft's unified communications product Live Communication? In the meantime, social media is here and now, and no longer something that only your secretary should know about.

The Wall St Journal's Business Technology blog has outlined how to use LinkedIn.

The guide is useful, even if for some, LinkedIn is passe.

Persuading anyone in-house about LinkedIn may need to take a back seat for me just now. I have an interesting enough time working out why my geek colleagues use Skype as a defacto IM client instead of Twitter or Pownce.

Update 18/09/07: Chris Brogan lists five things to on LinkedIn.

Pownce, the micromedia platform growing faster than Twitter, seems ready to explode following recent mainstream media coverage, including the The New York Times on Sunday.

Basically, Pownce enables P2P file-sharing within a social network (great for a business environment as there are good discussion-tracking functions - but that's for another day).

According to Publishing 2.0's Robert Young, who does a great job pulling together the important bits of recent news around Pownce, music and movie companies should be watching closely as legal download growth is slowing and illegal download growth accelerating again. Cause and effect?

Social networking is circling again. Someone should be buying Kevin Rose and Lee Culver a coffee.

Dave Winer explains Twitter, as the the company prepares for the next stage of its development now that additonal funding has been secured. Twitter is, writes Dave:

1. A network of users
2. A micro-blogging system
3. A relatively open identitiy system
4. An ecosystem

And having just had the chance to try out the iPhone for three days, I understand the appeal of Twitter giving all employees the phone.

Had a conversation with a client today about whether social media was for everyone - especially employees whose job did not involve sitting at a desk with a computer?  I think if employers want to reach these individuals with something other than a poster in a canteen or a team meeting, then social media can help.

If employees had some form of mobile device - phone, PDA etc - and use something like Twitter or Kyte TV, communication is timely and two way. RSS ensures it can be pull, comments allow feedback, and the devices enable employees to get on with their jobs. You can run, but you can't hide! 

Hill & Knowlton's Niall Cook has raised an interesting point about the possible values of Twitter in the workplace. Twitter is what Wikipedia refers to as a 'social networking and micro-blogging' system that asks just one question: What are you doing?

Niall forwards some good examples of possible uses of an internal corporate Twitter - or Critter as he dubs it - and they are good. When I talk about really simple social media, Twitter fits the bill - it can be used like SMS messaging but with a subscriber-base attached to ensure that the messages are pull rather than push. This is where the appeal is for internal corporate use.

Critter could provide a good testing ground for companies who remain a little uncertain about social media, as it introduces them to the concept of opening up a little to a captive audience, and letting the subscribers to a Tweet (for Twitters do Tweet, just as Texters send Texts - not sure what users of Critters do, mind) decide how to react to the information. Good practice for the individual and (normally) good for the company culture.