Here in the corporate world, we've decided we find microblogging useful also. But not the branded sense of using Twitter (although marketing uses it certainly, as I do personally.) We have installed laconi.ca on a server (open source microblogging application), and from there we use it internally to dialogue (or 'tweet') with other colleagues and coworkers from around the world. I've found it incredibly useful, eye-opening, and entertaining: useful to ask those general company questions and collaborate/share tech information, eye-opening to learn about what other people in the company do around the world, and an entertaining back channel when there are quarterly livestreamed company presentations. Sharon Greenfield Digital Ethnographer @SharonG On Nov 2, 2009, at 4:52 AM, David Jones wrote:
Interesting discussions so far. We use Twitter as a primary communications stream among some of our professors and PhD students at Old Dominion, and it works wonderfully well for the most part. It's flexible in a way I don't think FB statuses can be. Sure, you can use to it update people about relatively mundane, everyday parts of your life. But, given its ties to other services, I think it has so much potential to be a powerful communications stream. It has an inherent ability to quickly network different media, services, and people on an ad hoc basis (a la the Iran elections situation). For me and my fellow doctoral students at ODU, it's allowed us to network with people who have similar research interests outside of ODU.
The real power behind Twitter comes when you work through a third- party client that allows users to quickly access some of the other services that network into Twitter, like Twitpic. Tweetdeck is a pretty popular app amongst me and my fellow students. It's quick, flexible, and it has a drag-and-drop feature for images and links that often comes in pretty handy. We've taken to using hashtags to organize tweets into class and organization-specific streams. We track conversations about reading material, research interests, etc. And we use it as a way to disseminate links to information and longer conversations that might happen in other spaces.
As someone said earlier, the one annoyance I've found is the overwhelming number of bots and spam.
Dave Jones Old Dominion University djone111@odu.edu