Organizations embrace Twitter? Not. Don’t forget SOX. Don’t forget auditability and accountability. There is no corporate rhythm Twitter can adapt to; except some of the @ functions might be attractive for abbreviations. No wait, that was Visicalc, 123, then Excel.

Think outside the firewall. Is there a better way for an enterprise to track trends, buzz, responses? Have you ever been tasked with building a database around internal/external initiatives for expansion and development? Responses to issues?

GMail goes down today, more or less globally, and it’s instantly known across the entire universe of those on Twitter. Gosh, what if Google were using that stream to monitor the genesis of the failure by the first message reporting it? Without having to sort through the sixteen million support tickets flooding into them on a second-by-second basis.

If you take Twitter the current service out of your thinking and consider the architecture (I can’t believe I’m telling YOU guys this stuff), what Steve writes makes perfect sense. Really.

Is it an IT concern? Yes.

I have architected solutions on both small and large enterprises, and the far better bottomline goes to the organization that has done an excellent job on its SLA and processes; not to mention the lower percentage of attrition rate of its employees.

IMs? Who among employees would want to get IM’d for work? Staff would rather be invisible in IM. Employees prefer email, it gives them their own space and time and respond appropriately to colleagues.

But let me see if I can understand Kevin Cannon’s comment above anyway, where he argues that Email, Twitter and IM are completely different mediums.

Of course they’re not. They’re all identical. They all move across the network according to different protocols, perhaps (but not certainly), but they are all exactly the same thing: methods of communicating with one or more people on the network.

The question this post addresses is basic: Which method is the most effective use of time and attention?

If you understand Twitter and related Twitteresque services, then you start to understand the power they present in terms of measuring and garnering attention on the network. This is not just a parrot of what Steve writes here and elsewhere — I see it in action every single day.

I’m having difficulty understanding how so-called network/IT professionals don’t see it when it’s as plain as the tweet on the stream.

IM is a real-time conversation with someone, like having a chat over coffee.
Email is a non real-time communication like sending a letter or fax.
Twitter is like being an obnoxious loud guy at a party.

As Nick said, unless you spend all your life online, the communication methods really are very distinct.

Outside of the breathless techno-social bubble real people neither know nor care nor have time for such things.