As I write this, Twitter is growing by leaps and bounds, and so to is my list of followers (Barrack Obama just became a follower... must be a bot). To put it in a business context, a Network World survey of 583 IT execs found that 84% said they visit social networking sites on a regular basis, up from 68% last year; 64% use those same sites more than they did one year ago.
As it transforms social media, Twitter is helping to reinvigorate the corporate intranet. At Prescient Digital Media we use a Twitter-like platform called Yammer. It's free to use and myself and other staff are using it to keep abreast of each other's work and activities.
Other companies are rolling out their own microblogging platforms for employees. Janssen-Cilag Australia & New Zealand launched an internal microblogging platform called Jitter. “Combined with our intranet's people search capabilities, this formed an interesting enterprise hybrid of Facebook & Twitter style capabilities,” writes Nathan Wallace, Associate Director - Information Technology for Janssen-Cilag (see Jitter: Experimenting with microblogging in the enterprise ). This new intranet microblogging solution garnered them a Highly Commended in the 2008 Intranet Innovation Awards.
The future for Twitter is extremely bright: they've turned down one US$500 million offer from Facebook, undoubtedly several other big offers, and are undoubtedly worth well north of $1 billion. Twitter has just raised an additional US$35 million in venture capital and no doubt has some big plans for that cash, but is so far remaining hush and humble about the plans and their success to date.
You can read the full article on by Intranet Blog.
And follow me on Twitter @tobyward
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