April 13, 2009 – 12:51
I was asked by my colleague Dafna to give the team a brief introduction what is Twitter and how it may become relevant to our Enterprise customers. With Salesforce.com , SAP and every joe-enterprise-vendor announcing ’support for Twitter’ in their upcoming release, we wanted to take a step back and try to understand some of the nuances.
The slide deck itself is pretty rudimentary, as most of the discussion was verbal, but you can see it below. Followed by some insights which I gained from the meeting.
Some insights:
Its interesting how Twitter takes the opposite approach from most Enterprise Vendors. To Enterprise vendors, you start with the structure (which is usually extremely rigid), build the processes on top and then allow the eco-sphere + customers/end-users to try to apply some flexibility (On the four levels of flexibility: DataBase, Services, Process and UI). Twitter is quite the opposite. The data is there, full flowing (the “Firehose”) and now, an eco-sphere is emerging trying to apply some structure to the flow
Whats sorely missing is a ‘throttle’ control to the twitter flow. Assuming you are a super-busy professional (Aren’t we all?) you should have a way to say “now I want only ‘important’ stuff”, lets say, something with high keyword relevance to you + several re-tweets. Othertimes – all the German colleagues are enjoying Easter and your inbox is empty – you can put the ‘throttle’ to ‘Full mode’.
Twitter is like the story of the elephant with four blind men. I have been using it for a while now and see it as something else. Others come with a fresh view and its really amazing how everyone sees the angle differently
I’m hoping to have this session with additional colleagues in the lab and improve the slide-deck with each iteration.
