June 1st, 2009
Twitter on your intranet: 17 microblogging tools for business
Ultimately, if you want to use the right tool for the job, you’re probably going to need a specialized microblogging platform.So you’re bitten by the Twitter bug and want to bring the social messaging experience to work in order to connect with and share information conveniently amongst your colleagues. Perhaps you’ve even obtained permission to try out microblogging in trial form on your local intranet. You sit down and begin to see how you can adopt social messaging internally. It goes slowly at first…
As a Web-based consumer application, you quickly discover that while Twitter itself is a terrific environment, it isn’t very usable yet for businesses because of it lacks a variety of capabilities needed to fully work on the local intranet (details on this below). You wonder what other options exist to bring microblogging to the workplace in a business-friendly manner. Plenty, it turns out.
As we’ll see, choosing one carefully will be key to the long-term success of your experiment.
With the recent growth of Web 2.0 tools in the workplace (to about half of all organizations today), this scenario is becoming more common. The good news is that the broad success of Twitter over the last year has led to the introduction of a whole series of business-focused microblogging applications that bring many (though not yet all) of the necessary enterprise capabilities to the microblogging world.
What exactly is microblogging?
Unless you’ve used Twitter for a while you may be forgiven for wondering why traditional blog platforms you might have already adopted can’t be used for microblogging. With some exceptions (most notably Wordpress and its free Prologue 2 microblogging offering), most blog platforms just aren’t up to the task. Microblogging has its own mode of operation that is similar though definitely distinct from traditional blogs.
Microblogs have unique capabilities — and often, constraints — like short messages (often as little as 140 characters, like Twitter), a social messaging-friendly user profile with a short handle, integration of automatic URL shorteners, specialized tagging, and a Twitter-compatible API to use the dozens of high quality clients on desktop and mobile platforms are just some differences between blogs and microblogs. Ultimately, if you want to use the right tool for the job, you’re probably going to need a specialized microblogging tool if you decide to adopt this rapidly emerging new type of social messaging.
Adding an enterprise context to microblogs
Most businesses, particularly larger ones, also have their own unique requirements that can include at least seven critical areas that microblogging platforms can only ignore at their own peril. These needs arise for a variety of reasons but generally fall into the categories of security, governance, and policy. For example, this might include having to comply with internal and external technical standards, industry and local regulations, enterprise architecture guidelines, and so forth.
The enterprise is a mini-world of rules in its own right and the freewheeling environment of the Web has to be combined in some workable way with the tighter constraints of the workplace. All Web 2.0 tools face these challenges and this often means waiting for larger enterprise firms to produce enterprise-class versions of these kinds of applications that will be acceptable them, though certainly many are also adopting the consumer versions.
The seven enterprise areas that microblogging tools should address are:
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An internationally recognized enterprise architect and business strategist, Dion Hinchcliffe has been working for two decades with leading-edge methods to accelerate project schedules and raise the bar for software quality. You can follow Dion on Twitter.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 06/02/09
