Whenever a new technological craze rears its ugly head, I try and think about how we could apply it in our business. And so, as I mentioned in the previous post, my thoughts have recently turned to Twitter.
I can easily see the scenario: every employee has an account on an internal Twitter-like service (for the purposes of this post, let's call it Critter - Corporate Twitter). They log their contact preferences and subscribe to receive colleagues' "tweets" (they can subscribe to an individual or a group of individuals). They have a web interface, a desktop application and a device capable of receiving SMS (and maybe also Blackberry PIN messages). Whenever someone they subscribe to provides an update on what they are doing, they get notified. They can also inform the system what they are doing, thus notifying their subscribers.
Imagine the situation: I tell Critter that I'm just about to start working on a proposal for ACME Widgets. One of my subscribers (who I don't actually know) sees this and responds that they used to work at ACME Widgets - suddenly a connection has been made that could help me, that probably wouldn't have otherwise been made. As a result we win the contract, and I get promoted and a huge bonus (OK, I made the last bit up).
At a more mundane level, I might just tell Critter that I'm really enjoying reading the CEO's latest blog post (OK, I made that bit up to). I link to it, and my subscribers go and take a look too.
Of course, like Twitter Critter would also have an API so anyone can build internal services on top of it and integrate it into the intranet.
Can't be too difficult. Can it?