Twitter, a social networking site that allows people to track each other by writing and exchanging short text messages, has spurred business technology leaders to investigate how they might utilize such a service to improve their organizations' ability to collaborate and communicate with colleagues and customers.
Twitter has gained popularity among the social media digerati in large part because it addresses the problem of information overload on the Web by requiring that users keep their posts brief and concise (140 characters or less). It's become a phenomenon known as "microblogging."
But while users can see Twitter's practical benefits, the service has been dogged with outages (mostly server performance issues) that have threatened its viability. Analysts and IT practitioners say that, coupled with improved access and administrative controls, would need to be addressed before microblogging could have a place in their organizations.
"You need to understand how you will manage and filter the information," says Jonathan Yarmis, an analyst with AMR Research who researches emerging technologies. "What information we create, and who we share it with, will become an issue in the enterprise (for microblogging)."
Source: CIO, http://cio.com