Using Twitter for your Intranet

When developing Intranets these days, Twitter often comes up as a possible service to integrate. This blog post takes a look at Twitter for enterprise Intranet solutions.

There are of course other micro blogging/messaging services that may be more geared towards the Enterprise (such as Yammer) but Twitter obviously has a great advantage in the large user mass.

Benefits of Twitter in enterprise Intranets:

• Enables spontaneous knowledge sharing.
• It supports status updates by letting people easily twit what they are doing at the moment.
• It strengthens your social network.
• It can be used for solving problems faster by letting you broadcast questions freely.
• It enables new exciting possibilities for collaboration and communication.
• It enables user centered subscription and full control of what information to receive.
• The distance or divide between managers and employees is less when managers start twittering.
• The barrier to communication is lower. You can still twit if you are in a hurry.
• You can receive breaking news faster.
• It can be used to profile the company as futuristic and innovative by using new media.

Drawbacks of using Twitter in enterprise Intranets:

• It can become a waste of time. (like Facebook often is)
  Often interruptive. (Especially if you use a twitter client that shows popup messages)
• It can be seen as just another tech hype. (It will be replaced with something else in a year or two. Employees will have yet another service to sign up on.)
• Because of the format and the low barrier to publish information it can be more easily used to spread gossip and rumors.
• It can contribute to make a skewed perspective of some issue or subject because twitter is all bottom-up in contrast to editorial quality assured top-down information that takes longer time to prepare.
• Higher chance that employees will leak confidential or sensitive information.
• We don't know how Twitter will develop it's service and how we must evolve our systems to support and maximize the benefits of the service.
• The long term consequences of use in the enterprise is unknown
• Integration of service will cost money, depending on how you integrate it.