How to make Twitter more business friendly

So I was reading Rachel Reuben’s guest post on .eduGuru (nice paper by the way, you should check it out) and the part about Twitter got me thinking about real world use for Twitter-like applications. Rachel’s paper gears toward the ‘Marketing and Communications’ side of the university, and it is hard to disagree with her and her many sources.

But the propeller head in me thinks, “Surely it can be more than just a marketing tool. How can it be used internally?”  My gut reaction is, it can’t, at least not in it’s current state. And I’ll expound.

Graph from Google Trends

I’ll be comparing a few other micro-blogging sites with Twitter in an effort to come up with one that I think could be used just as Rachel’s sources state, but also provide a valuable internal tool as well. I will be examing Twitter, Plurk, Rejaw, and Indenti.ca.

Twitter wins hands down as far as user base (1,244,982 as of investigation according to TwitDir, but I know that is quite a bit off because according to Twitterholic I was in the 14 million to sign up), but we all know about the growing pains they have been through.  Twitter is simple and due to the API has many desktop applications so that you really never have to go to the website. Also, it will hard to move the user base away from Twitter. The APIs auto-update at certain intervals, but the web site does not.

Plurk (65,448 users according to Plurk Mania) wins hands down in functionality.  The biggest complaint, I believe, is the sideways scrolling. Plurk search and Twitter search indicate that it seems there is more negative than positive.  Other than that it allows you to embed pictures and videos.  It allows for threaded conversations, and has groups. To be widely accepted I think Plurk needs to adopt an “official” API.  They have the unofficial one at Google Groups, and there are some desktop apps that are slowly creeping out.

The other two are small and don’t have many users (to be fair to Rejaw, they just launched June 5, 2008).  To me, Identi.ca is just like Twitter except open source.  Rejaw allows all the embedding that Plurk does, but it does have two things that make it stand out to me.  Its website updates using push technology instead of pull as it seems all the rest do. It also jumped ship on the 140 character limit and raised it to 1000 characters.

So all that being said what needs to happen for massive internal adoption.  The best features from all the above could make a very good communication tool.

• A simple interface that has more options if you want them. For business use, you should be able to embed items directly into the post.
• Better privacy and groups, because not everything is public knowledge.
• More fine grained search, to allow people to only search what they should see.
• An API so that the application can be ported to where the user is and not force the user to come to us.
• Push updating. Makes it closer to IM than what is currently on Twitter.
• Higher character limit. 140 is to low for business use.

I don’t think that is too much to ask for, do you? If you have some new thoughts, let me know. By the way, I am on all of these services (username: ctbarber), but really only interact on Twitter. Why? Because that’s where all the people are.

todd