IBM Twits or Silly Walks?
|
It's not easy quantifying the success of Twitter, HitWise numbers not withstanding. As Clint Boulton wrote on eWEEK, the social butterfly can hardly be called mainstream, even if its adepts (myself included) find its growth more useful than many other social networks, if for no other reason than speed. Clint cautions, though: Though the company said in a report that visits have more than doubled in the last three months, and traffic rocketed up 60 percent in the past month, the site ranked only 439 among social networks and forums last week and 4,309 among all categories of Web sites. WSJ doyen Kara Swisher did her own poll during a friend's wedding and, surprise, no one, nadie, personne, she asked had even heard of Twitter. No surprise because she merely confirmed her own deeply held preconceptions. Keep at it, Kara. No one's going to need more than 8K of memory either, and you know that because you asked your parents over breakfast. The larger trend belies Kara's take entirely: as social networking consultant Rodney Rumford put it: The glaring conclusion and undeniable truth is that Twitter is growing very rapidly in the past few months and might be close to hitting a tipping point. When I see journalists, leading bloggers, teens, 20 somethings and executives using twitter I know there is something compelling to the service that is cross generational/demographic and that value is there. Rodney also noted that many Japanese companies are embracing Twitter (in their enthusiasm for everything mobile), and predicted that this trend will get ported across the Pacific to our shores. His post led one Big Blue Fool to tout IBM's own version of Twitter. This is confirmed by IBM knowledge management specialist Luis Suarez, who is an admitted avid Twitter user. He wrote that IBM is "experimenting, behind the firewall, with our own Twitter clone (Called BlueTwit)." So IBM is desperate to add some of that zesty Enterprise 2.0 to its overcooked stew of applications. But all users will get out of its efforts is a vitiated dish served up on more of IBM's clunky stack of old ideas. What could be more ridiculous? At first, the idea brought to mind the image of Monty Python's village idiot or, in this case, twit. But as I think about its awkward contortions, I think IBM is actually more eligible for the Ministry of Silly walks. |
Comments (2)
Where else but Twitter could I get to understand the in depth thinking of such glitterati as Danny Sullivan, David Berkowitz, and Lisa Barone?
Posted by Shirley de Rose | May 1, 2008 2:30 PM
Wow - this is a shockingly harsh critique of IBM from someone who doesn't seem to have a grasp of the enterprise marketplace. If IBM represents an antiquated approach to enterprise software then I would be curious how the author thinks most enterprises work... In all seriousness, if you're going to publicly assault a major corporation (and advertiser I can't help but note), you might actually want to provide some fact/justification as opposed to random and incoherent rants.
Enough snarkiness - its easy to see how Twitter adds value on the internet, but the fact of the matter is that no major corporation will use the public Twitter in an official capacity beyond marketing. However, an intranet version of Twitter has quite a bit of interest in several areas (I'm not at liberty to mention any that I'm aware of beyond the more public IBM experiment) and may pose a potential fix to the perceived "scourge" of intranet IM. If IBM were to come up with a stable, simple, enterprise-class version of Twitter that could be internally hosted, then they're could be on to something.
Posted by Josh Street | May 2, 2008 9:23 AM