Multi-tool Twitter

Half a year ago I moved to Amsterdam. Great city, many interesting people, many cultural events, vast amount of bars, ... How to find your way around, how to meet great people, the right places to eat, the places to buy honest ingredients, ..? I put my money on Twitter and got lucky. Twitter got me in touch with new media researchers, promising entrepreneurs, social events, #blog08, ... it even got me interviewed in a large newspaper. Twitter is a multi-tool and I like it! 836 tweets in 3 months got me connected with 50-60 people. 15 of them I actually met in real life. NRC / nrc next journalist Marie-José Klaver interviewed me about the role of Twitter in organisations, specifically about its role as a knowledge management tool.

@blog08 on Friday 23 October

• Pete Cashmore, 10th blog of the world, Mashable.com
• Hugh MacLeod, well known cartoonist and blogger at Gapingvoid.com
• Boris van der Ham, member of Dutch parliament and blogger
• Scott Rafer, former-CEO of MyBlogLog currently CEO of Lookery
• Tim Overdiek, chief-editor of the Dutch broadcast news programme NOS Journaal and blog evangelist
• Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, well known Dutch internet entrepreneur
• Nalden, music blogger living of his experimental blog, Nalden.net
• GabeMac, videoblogger from Madrid
• Piet Bakker, scientist, Universiteit van Amsterdam

The role of Local 2.0 in Enterprise 2.0?

Last Friday I attended The Next Web Salon for the second time in a row. Got to meet interesting people and got triggered by the 10 minute presentation by Michael Bauer. Michael Bauer is a local internet expert and CEO of Koano. Michael's presentation, though very short but nevertheless good, was about the future of local. Local as in: Search, Mapping, Ontology, International, Social, Network.

Imagine a web app that allows me as a citizen of Amsterdam to find the kind of places I know and like in Amsterdam when I travel abroad. E.g. Vondelpark in Amsterdam, is similar to, Central Park in New York. A recommendation system based on things you know well near your 'home' to find things near your 'locus' (the place you are).

What would be the impact of such a mechanism in an enterprise context? In large organisations where it's beyond your possibilities to know everything, but you do know your thing. So, what if the coordinates are not geographic, but organisational. Your place in the value chain, business process, organogram, stakeholder network, ... In the pit of my gut I feel there is something good about this... (Photo taken by Anne Helmond)

Is Twitter a useful enterprise 2.0 application?

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger published their thoughts on Situated Learning "Legitimate peripheral participation" in 1991. A rather theoretical book on how people evolve from newcomers to key members of communities of practice. I remember an example of Etienne:

think of taxidrivers and their radio network. On the radio they get calls from the station and their colleagues. They do not listen actively to the radio, but they catch messages that might be of their interest. Some colleague mentioning a traffic jam, some other problem that they may circumnavigate, et cetera. They are in peripheral mode. When something occurs that might be of interest to other colleagues, they send a message to all others listening. Hence, they become active and center of the network for a short while.

The same goes for communities of practice. Sometimes you are merely listening, sometimes you jump in the center and participate actively. My perspective on Twitter is that it's the web version (of the radio network) of groups of people with a common interest, or practice. As Twitter states:

"people follow the sources most relevant to them and access information via Twitter as it happens"

If Twitter gets adopted by the business community, meaning adopted as a tool in the context of work and learning in the context of the enterprise, it may well become the means to follow what is going on in the enterprise, without being as disruptive as the "Beep Beep: you've got mail" If you think Twitter is just another gadget keeping employees from working, you're wrong! Twitter is the community radio!

Lipogram

Shakerleg!