Twitter at the Office

Andy McAfee didn’t quite understand all the buzz about Twitter. The Harvard Business School professor has built quite a following around his work looking at how Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking can be great collaboration tools in the enterprise. But Twitter? 140-character communications?

Then he fired up his own account and quickly began to see the possibilities, not only for building a personal network, but also as an office tool. Writing in his blog post, The Twit’s Progress, McAfee observes:

“I think Twitter is a fantastic technology for enterprise purposes, especially if it lets users categorize their tweets so that they’re not just a single undifferentiated stream (as a number of people pointed out, hashtags are a current means of accomplishing this). An enterprise version of Twitter would let communities of practice, interest groups, and other collaborations quickly and easily self-organize, swap thoughts, and keep each other up to date. I’d expect that these collaborations would be based primarily around topics as opposed to around people, which makes the ability to categorize all the more important.”

Twitter users, what do you think? Do you think this technology could be a useful addition to daily life in business? What are the barriers? Should an Enterprise Twitter version be developed?

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