Microblogging – What’s next?

I was involved in enterprise microblogging right from its start. Being part of something, it is always hard to have a neutral opinion on it. However, due to my academic view on the topic I would claim to stand somewhat outside the hype centre. So I ask myself these days: what is next?

While others made several predictions yet (i.e. Gartner’s view on the topic) I am especially interested in the level of microblogging adoption. Is ‘microblogging’ really what we see today for example in Twitter? Is that the end of the development? This would mean that the only challenge in enterprise contexts is to adopt it in the right way to create enterprise twitterers.

When I look at microblogging I primary see a huge instrument for information transmission with the recipient choosing the sources. Sources today mostly are humans. There are funny exceptions like the London Tower Bridge (http://twitter.com/towerbridge) or the Tweeting Cat Door (http://twitter.com/GusAndPenny). However, we do not see such implementations in the enterprise. Most enterprise information would fit for microblogging usage but we cannot find it there. Think on new quotes, new orders or new customers (coming from an ERP system), or alerts from the fire control system, or oil level alerts from the company’s cars. There is huge potential in integrating the company’s stream of microinformation using microblogging. Human text messages are only one part of it.

The problem is that in using 100% human postings we started with the most difficult part. Every Twitter user can tell from the problems one have with several 100 followed users. You simply cannot be aware of every posting. However, every posting might be worthy. Therefore intelligent systems should help us to find connections between postings and to filter the most important ones. The bad thing is that this is very hard to achieve in an unstructured 140 character long piece of text. In combining these contents with well-structured streams of machine-readable data we (respectively our computer) could better understand the whole information ecology evolving out of microblogging. I expect the future to bring further developments in this area. Let’s see