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Twitter is not just microblogging anymore?

4-Jan-2010

Tags: Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Twitter

Twitter apparently isn't just for "microblogging" anymore. Co-founder Biz Stone would now describe it as an "information network." So there you have it: the activity you engage in on Twitter is now "information networking." Thankfully, everyone's already calling it "tweeting" instead.

I can understand Twitter's ambition to become an all-encompassing framework for "what's happening right now," and changing Twitter's "what are you doing?" prompt to "what's happening?" made perfect sense in that respect. And by now almost every vendor in our Collaboration & Community Software evaluation research has added some sort of "microblogging" service. So, of course, Twitter would like to emphasize they're on to something bigger than that.

This is nothing new, of course. Over the past decade, we've had web content management and document management vendors rebrand themselves enterprise content management (then back to web content management, and now on to enterprise web content management). Or search vendors become business intelligence and information access. Blog software gets re-labeled web content management. Forum software morphs into social CRM. Wikis get rebranded as "collaborative platforms." All of this reflects what vendors want you to think of them -- it's wishful thinking on their part, and doesn't necessarily correlate with the actual product, or how their customers are currently using it.

We try to stick to nomenclature that we think our customers will find clearest. As you can imagine, sometimes our way to classify a tool isn't in synch with how a vendor or an open source project aspires to be perceived. We call a spade a spade, even if we're repeatedly told it's not. Because it's a "garden organizer," ideally suited for landscaping; or it's a "multifunctional implement," because you can do a lot more things with it than just dig holes. But whether a spade is a bloody shovel is debatable enough, so there really is no need for additional confusion.

And "information networking"? That's not going to help describe what Twitter is (or what it wants to become). Information networking is something you do -- like gardening -- and Twitter is a tool you might use -- like a spade. Don't pretend the spade in itself is going to provide you with beautiful landscaping.

So, sorry Mr. Stone. Even though this particular microblog service is getting bigger and bigger -- I'm going to stick with the "microblogging" label for now.

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