I just had a very cool phone chat with Jeff Schick, IBM's VP for social software. In the fleeting world of web-based Next Big Things that are huge today and dead tomorrow - see David's post below - these guys have a bit of a longer view. Jeff said IBM employees had a public "profile" page on the company's big mainframes when he joined 20 years ago.
Companies like IBM are worth listening to because they have two big features: the massive bags of cash and research talent needed to dip their toes into pretty much every trendy technology, science, philosophy and way of life on the planet, and the giant corporate customers and massive install bases that help them filter the signal from the noise, and separate the fleeting trends from the things that are here to stay.
So I asked Jeff the only question worth asking: Is twitter, and microblogging, here to stay? His answer, after the jump, was pretty interesting:
But let me tell you how I use it, and its almost the killer application of microblogging. I basically put my status into my microblog entry. Now IBM has 400,000 employees. I'm not going to give 400,000 employees access to my calendar. But I'm absolutely willing to microblog 'hey guys, today I'm in Dubai visiting the following folks', and share that across the company. So if people are looking for me or thinking about what I am doing, then they can clearly, easily see that, without needing to call my assistant or search around.
For that purpose, for basic status related activity, I think it's a very important application."
Yep. What he said.
While Twitter's signal:noise ratio is currently veering to the right, I think Jeff is spot-on in thinking that the concept of a publicly-viewable "status" is pretty much burned into the collective consciousness. Aside from the basic utility of checking up on where someone is and what someone is doing, the instant-search aspect is huge.
Imagine an IBM employee who has never met or known Jeff. He is about to do some work for a client with a Dubai office, and he needs to get the pulse of what is going on over here. In about ten seconds, he could find out that the company has a switched-on senior executive visiting the country.
Extrapolate that kind of usefulness to other areas - tech guys wondering if anyone else has already dealt with the same problem, sales guys needing a contact in Brussels, managers wanting to get a feeling for how employees are dealing with the new computer system. The answers, or at least the beginnings of the answers, to all these problems, could be found in seconds after searching a decent microblogging system.
Judgement: Twittering, in the generic sense of the term, will be ruining our ability to concentrate and sharing our locations with potential stalkers long after Aston Kutchner and Demi Moore have moved on to the next random trend.
