Welcome – glad you found me!

I am always interesting in the concept of a walled twitter (not like Yammer and some of the E2.0 offerings, but more like twitter is now) with different levels of permissions for people in and out of the community. I don’t think will ever end up seeing that, but it would definitely be interesting.

I second your comment on what Twitter intended to do versus what it ended up doing. I think they have done remarkably well to grow their product into some semblance of enterprise-ready (unlike 2nd life in the past, but we still have a long ways to go).

Thanks for the read, looking forward to hearing more from you!

This reminds me of the business experience with virtual worlds (like Second Life), which were never designed to be business tools. I’m pretty sure that Linden Lab was taken aback by the business interest and use, but they, too, are struggling to realize a lot of benefit from the corporate denizens (like me!) who really want to have a virtual office where we can sit down for a meeting though many timezones apart.

I like your way of thinking. I agree with you in a lot of what you said – except that I am not sure there is a progress of Twitter towards a pre-conceived notion of what it should be (what the alpha or beta status would imply), rather there was a cool app that got lucky and engender several $BB in potential revenue. Time will tell…

Thanks for the read

That is a very interesting comparison between Twitter and the iPhone… I am going to have to think about it in much more detail. I agree that Twitter is not what was originally intended (probably) when created — but that was part of my point… we cannot twist anything to fit our ideas of what it should be. Twitter is what it is, and a business tool it is not.

Thanks for the comment (and the food for thought)

Here’s what I think is happening… Twitter was released in beta (really alpha if you are realistic about it) form because the only way that the twitter gang could figure out all the user stories/use cases is to get a large volume of people using the platform and watch how it evolves. The platform scales as fast as it can – and issues such as the one that Esteban encountered will occur as twitter adapts. It’s the nature of software evolution. Like it or not, we are all part of the Twitter test and product team. Use of Twitter is not free – we are contributing our user stories and test plans each time we tweet. This is the nature of commerce in the 21st century – not all value is measured in hard currency. Eventually value needs to convert to currency (we need to eat and have shelter) but much can be traded with experience and reputation.
.-= Steve Burgess´s last blog ..House Committee to Review PPM =-.

Joking aside – I can imagine a room full of people about 3 years ago, trying to figure out what people might want to do with a platform which can send out 140 characters at a time. Going out on a limb here – 10 people sitting in an audience furiously keeping up with a keynote at a conference one tweet at a time probably did not make the top 10 – just sayin’

The analogies between Twitter and the iPhone are rather remarkable – think about that for few minutes. Both super cool, on platforms (or networks) which have questionable reliability, yet have thousands of people building applications and businesses on top of….
.-= mitch lieberman´s last blog ..mjayliebs: @BrentLeary – now we are talkin’ ! Happy Turkey Day … =-.

- Prem
.-= Prem Kumar´s last blog ..Simple strategies for Social CRM implementations =-.

You said what I am thinking better than I can. Thanks for that, as usual. Maybe you should start writing my stuff?

Thanks
Esteban

(oh yeah, agree with you 100%)

And I agree – for now it has to do. But we want to make sure that as we move forward we proceed with caution — we don’t want to find every single rattlesnake in that underbrush

Alas, I am not certain that they have setup their platform sufficiently to be able to do that well. Different levels imply that the platform can take it — and I am not certain that their architecture is there yet. Of course, mostly talking from experience – not really from seeing their architecture. They may have already setup certain VIPs (not me obviously) on a super-secret double-confidential platform so they won’t fail anymore.

I am indeed looking forward to seeing a better, more reliable architecture even if have to pay.

Thanks
Esteban

I agree on SMS, even Twitter, being able to communicate on 140-165 characters (I use SMS all the time, I like it a lot) – but can a business conduct transactions at 140 characters at the time? (that was probably a better worded question). I think that they can be made aware to an issue, they can react to an alert, or they can get an idea by trending of what is going on.

I think that Twitter can be faster than SMS and email (based on my own testing on breaking news and alerts) for notifications and that is just one of the many potential uses for it in businesses. Alas, the limits and availability issues still remain. Would you like to move your alerts to Twitter only to find out that because of a 503-error (fail whale) it was not distributed? Or how about if the alert that says that water is building up in your server room sub-flooring is denied because you twitted too much already for the hour / day /week?

I think that the platform is interesting, but it does not have anywhere near the realibility and availability we expect to find in business tools. Mine was just an example, you can call it silly, but it shows the Achilles heel for them as they try to move deeper into the enterprise.

Thanks for the great comment. Got me thinking and helped me re-word my proposition (I think) better.
Esteban