Twitter = aggregation for the masses
I think I have been following RSS almost from day 1 (almost). I have been using a feed aggregator almost since Dave Winner – the “inventor” – and his company Radio Userland started to evangelize feeds and more specifically RSS feed (as oppose to Atom format which is a bit more complicated to deploy but expose more feature).
I have always wondered how this invention will actually propagate in the masses. The RSS icon is not so user friendly and still does not talk much to my mom, adding a feed to an aggregator is not so obvious, real feed aggregator (like Google’s reader) remains very geeky… somehow with Netvibes, My Yahoo and alike we reach a state where it can be use by slightly bigger population than just the nerds but in my opinion it is still not very satisfying. That’s where Twitter becomes REALLY powerful. From a "share my status and what I am doing" tool they reach the state of being the aggregator of the masses. Everyone shares its links on his/her Twitter channel. Thanks to the API, big medias publish links to their online content as soon as it’s published, blog plateform let you use plugin that will publish any update from your blog on your Twitter channel, not to mention all other tools build up on top of the API that lets you share picture, video, status, and links… ie. Twitter has become the aggregator for the masses.
How is that good for the "Enterprise world ?
Yet another one of this technology coming from the consummer that will end up in the enterprise world. To the question what is the best way to share knowledge within all employees and workers I bet that Twitter could do the job. A tool like Twitter seems a perfect fit to share status, project update, website update, in a way where actually everyone (or almost everyone) will use it. In some other words I do believe in tools like Yammer (never tried it though) that won the Techcrunch 500 last year.
With that in mind we might as well check out product like Bantam, a social CRM that lets you communicate, share information and manage relationships inside and outside an organisation, ie. a Facebook-like for enterprise.
Some interesting links around Twitter
- Twitter Dictionary
- Twitter 101
- Twitter Cisco: Cisco News
- Brandrepublic: User generated videos invade Twitter
- CIO: Bringing the Twitter-like Experience to the Enterprise
- With Twitter you can follow Sport: Roland Garros, Tennis on BBC, Wimbledon, Lance Armstrong,…
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