I was just reading this article on the use of twitter, or a twitter like application across IBM. It is interesting to see a corporate use of a tool like twitter. Certainly emplyees could have continued to stay in touch using email, but for some reason they turned to a new tool. I don’t beleieve the reason has to do with meeting people outside a working circle of connections. I imagine it has to do with a more real time value relative to understanding how what one person is doing affects another. It would be interesting to get a consolidated view of the values recieved from the IBMers who Twitter. One such IBMer says IBM gets the value not him. He has something to do with Lotus, of all things, and uses Twitter to monitor what people think of the Lotus tools. He also states that it helps him keep in touch with people he is working with. This I doubt, if it did then he would say it provides him value.
While the article points out IBMers twitter, the article does not point out the types of connections they have or so called followers or the values received. It would be interesting and of more value to understand why IBMer Twitter. The value of Twitter is suspect for me because it lacks a context or the context is extremely vauge. What I mean is the connections are defined by say a market we are all work in, versus a project we work on or a deliverable we are creating. My Twitter account has allowed me to better understand specific people who work within my market, by name, but it has not provided any direct value in terms of delivering something. As well many of the messages are cryptic, like my last one – 2nd glass of red, big ones, or one of my followers – I just ate peanut butter LOLZ hope I don’t diiiiiie. I wonder what the IBMer are Tweeting?
Context is very important. Concurrent with writing this post I am skyping with one of the founders of Seemage. The context of our Skype/IM is just to catch up. But our conversation certainly could not happen in Twitter. Certainly we might discover we are both online through Twitter, but Twitter would not have been productive for our chat.
Take the case one step further. Lets assume Eric and I are working on the delivery of a new part design and that we sat more than 200 feet apart. We would certainly look for a way to stay in touch on our activities. The natural approach today is to email each other on things we need and on updates. This works but it has many know problems, which is most likely why people are trying other tools. Wouldn’t it be nice to have my discussions connected directly to what they are about? I think so! If I ask Eric what the diameter of a hole must be and I do this in email then I must find the answer when he replies. If this discussions was available through the actual hole in the CAD file then I would not need to manage these message among many other messages in my inbox. Lets further imagine Eric had a spreadsheet with calculations on part cost and he could relate discussions to specific cells. Wouldn’t this be better than broadcasting to a large group of people who might care?
