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

If you have a look at the current sales rank of video game consoles you find a product named “Wii” on the top. This is quite amazing because the Wii is slower as its competitors, it has much less features and the graphic is years behind. The little secret of the Wii is literally little: a ½ foot long controller whose position and angle is detected by the Wii and allows unprecedented ways to navigate in computer games. And that is fun!

Some people designing Terabyte data stores or programming high-end enterprise software will probably tell us that they have nothing in common with this nice after work fun. But maybe they are wrong.
Traditionally the market for video game consoles was focused on power users. Sony’s Playstation and Microsoft’s Xbox competed each other with high-level gaming machines brimming over with power. Nintendo’s Wii just left them behind in doing exactly what is challenging enterprise software today: they broad it to the masses. Nintendo followed the Blue Ocean Strategy. This means that they focused on people who were not the classical target groups of game consoles. This required a design which allowed people to play Wii games without having years of experience in using consoles. And this seems to work.

Though it is even possible to use SAP Systems via your Wii controller it will sure not be the solution for enterprise software redesign. It is the general idea behind the Wii which could be a model for enterprise software: Make it easy. Beyond that it is not a full redesign what has to be done: enterprise software is not easy. But it is the user interface which could get simplified and has to be renewed. Fortunately there is some other innovation that we could use in our domain to enrich the front-end. We are talking about Social Software.

It has been written much about what Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 and Social Software is. You could fill books with definitions. But the key factor is very simple. Flickr, del.ico.us, Wikipedia & Co. made the user develop from a passive consumer role to an active engagement as co-author of the World Wide Web. This key factor’s name is participation. The rule is easy: Success has who gives power in the hand of his users - power to produce content but also to structure and explore existing content in new, own ways and share them afterwards. Tim O’Reilly says „a platform beats an application every time”.

Well, „What is microblogging?“. I heard it several times over the last days and always do people expect an answer as simple as their question. I did not have this answer. Of course I know what microblogging is. I wrote my thesis on this topic. But how could I make them understand it without experiencing themselves? I tried “SMS in the web” or “Public emailing” but I always looked into faces formed to questionnaires. Afterwards I tried telling larger stories. Did not work. And I even demonstrated Twitter to show what it is and Communote to point out what it could do for a company. But even this did not help. I guess that you have to try microblogging by yourself a longer time to feel its benefits.

A few days ago I had the chance to talk to Prof Martin Gaedke, pioneer of Web Engineering research. He told me something very interesting: What is the difference between subscribing to a newspaper but not reading it (who has time for this today?) or not having a newspaper in your letter-box at all? The saved money on your cash account? No! The loss of information.

Prof Gaedke told me that even if you take the newspaper out of the letter-box, carry it to your house and place it on the kitchen table just to throw it away 2 days later keeps you informed. Even if you do not read it you will at least see some of the headlines or pictures or just single words affecting you. And you always have the possibility to have a look inside if you want to read more.

So this is (enterprise) microblogging! It is a company’s newspaper written without editors. It is a newspaper in realtime. It updates itself after every single new posting in one of its categories. And it even extends the idea of categories towards the idea of tagging. In using this an “article” can be part of multiple categories which helps you to get exactly what you are looking for. And finally, microblogging is a newspaper in a format readable by digital agents (i.e. RSS reader). Imagine you could have your personal robot searching the 1000 pages of your daily newspaper for exactly the information you need. Imagine this information could tell you about your company, its projects and the feelings of your employees. Imagine you could drill down from the general overview to the single information. Imagine you could even write the newspaper’s content yourself. This is microblogging.