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Jan
31
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Twittering
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: twitter.
Until last week, I hadn't heard of Twitter. Then Cole blogged about it, and the ETSTalk Podcast folks talked about it. They're looking at Twitter as a tool to facilitate shared awareness of organizational activities.
Twitter is essentially nanoblogging (I just made that word up) - stuff that is more of a quick "I'm doing this right now" kind of status update rather than a blog post. You create a set of "friends" and get to see updates in almost realtime of what they're up to. Right now.
Cole's investigating this from the perspective of "how would a tool like this affect teaching and learning, and running an organization" I'm not doing anything quite so lofty, I'm just playing.
What's kind of cool is that it makes it easy for me to track what I'm doing, so when it's time to do the Dreaded Procrastinated Timesheet Entry mere hours before the payroll cutoff, I could just spider the list of archived updates.
I'm not sure if there's any value in Twitter per se. Other tools have been doing this, from full-on blogs to tools like Facebook and MySpace. Do we really need a separate tool for this? Maybe it's a good thing because it's so tightly focussed…
The design of Twitter might be a bit overly simplified though. There's no way to define the audience for an update, although you can set a global flag that affects all of your updates. It'd be handy to have a private/friends/public distinction, so I could track stuff that nobody cares about, only my Friends, or everyone else. Also, the ability to tag updates, either as categories/keywords, or even with contexts ala GTD, would be handy, along with an interface to filter by tags (show me all things done @Work wih the tag "drupal" in the last 2 weeks)
The Twitter website needs some serious love, too. The UI is painful (tiny icons for "friends" and the only way to get a name is to rollover and wait for the tooltip. ick. etc…) and it's often really…. slow….. but it's usable with the addon tools like Twitterific.
Regardless, I'm dnorman on twitter. Like that's the first time I've been called a twit.
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6 Responses to “Twittering”
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Interesting, I could see me using it for project tracking if I could control who sees what. I guess though for that it would take 5 mins to knock up my own. For keeping friends and teammates up to date you can change your name on MSN / Skype IM tool so .. a little like a solution looking for a problem?
This is similar to the AIM/Skype/MSN status indicator, except that it’s asynchronous. For the IM status, it’s more of a synchronous presence. With Twitter, it’s an update-and-forget kind of thing. I think it would be MUCH more useful with finer granularity on audiences (groups, friends, tags, etc…) so you could just be monitoring a subset of everything. Maybe I want to keep up to date on Major Updates from a wide list of people, but only want to keep up on the fine details for a handful of people…
“Do we really need a separate tool for this?”
The real question is, do we really need to *DO* this? Is anyone’s life so very interesting that we have to report every single moment of every single day to the world? I mean, seriously — editorial filtering is a GOOD thing, right?
…Right?
If you look at it outside of the context of an organization, then yeah. “Petting the cat. Feeding the cat. Scratching my butt” becomes just more banality.
But, if it’s done within the context of an organization and/or community, it could be a handy way to keep in touch with what’s going on. But, looking at the Public stream just makes me cringe. MySpace in realtime. Yikes. But, I’m starting to wonder if Cole might be onto something wrt organizational culture etc…
And then there’s the whole “do I need everyone to know I spent 10 minutes in the can” thing…
Not sure if there is a real reason to do it, but I can say that being in there the past few days and watching my friend list grow has made me focus a ton of mental energy on it. I have learned things about my staff in ways that I didn’t before … that may sound sad that as a manager I need a tool like this to help, but at the end of the day it is a new exercise for them in living/working transparently. I’m not interested in their minute by minute work schedule — for crying out loud they do a TON of stuff and me getting in the way of that would be silly. What I am after (only now that I’ve been using this a couple of days) is a better view of how we as an organization “move.” It is interesting to see several of them all of a sudden be willing to explore their own days/tasks and expose them for the rest of us.
I had one person tell me today that they had no idea another person was working on a specific thing and it sparked a workplace conversation that would not have happened. That is interesting. Now think about the fact that at PSU our central ITS group is close to 500 people spread across 11 buildings on our campus — that doesn’t include college and departmental IT staff, just my organization. If they started doing this (or something closer to what D is thinking about) we’d be able to paint a much better map of how we spend our time and where we should exert energy. These are just new thoughts, so please don’t hold me to them in a handful of days when I move on to the next great thing. For today I am very interested.
I made a few notes about Twitter late last year, but like you am just playing with it at this point. I do see some potential as a learning tool, and I am fascinated by any tool which permits synchronous shared group writing activities of any kind.
The lack of granularity is a real problem though. I belong to an experimental community (stirman.net) which is a live aggregator of the group’s bookmarks, blog posts, twitters, etc… the problem is that once you have even one more particular audience you end up with strange redundancies and such. For instance, I have a blog plugin which twitters when I post a new blog entry. So I can’t enable the community blog tracking because if I did, the community would get those posts twice. But not everyone I know belongs to that community, etc.
I could imagine how painful implementation of granular selections (and the UI to manage it) could be though…