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.