Twitter and Facebook In Corporations: Set The Users Free!

Reading this reminded me of the early 1990s when companies were quite reticent about giving employees access to the internet at the office. IT departments were besides themselves about granting rank and file employees daily access on their desktops to the world wide web.

I headed corporate communications at the time at Hitachi's North American HQ and pleaded to open Web access to employees as a tool rather than a diversion.

I agree with Gary and complement Mr. Foremski on running this still relevant piece of wisdom.

Hi Tom

Thanks for the guest post. Unfortunately I have little more to say on the topic :) It pretty much says it all, after all we live in freedom do we not. The government trusts us to not view certain things, why should companies be more restrictive to our freedoms. Anyway, any good sys admin will know if you want to see what each employee is accessing and how much time they are spending accessing any sites, it is not that hard to do.

Although this pretty much equates to spying. Which make me think of something else... :) But I digress, an open policy is more beneficial to all, employees feel like they are people with freedoms. They are have to responibility to not exercise some of their freedoms in the work place.

For anyone that thinks different... most Sys Admins can determine what sites have been viewed off the network, it is not rocket science :)

However more on my mind this morning is something I pondered the other day. Why is Google Earth not helping in the search for debris in the Atlantic? Especially, seeing as the reports are now that the wreckage was NOT found http://www.of-networks.co.uk/blog/google_earth_search_for_missing_plane_-required

Once again the ethics surrounding man and machine come to the fore, indeed this area of ethics is going to have a huge impact society in the coming years and already is. Welcome to the revolution. I always think over the old Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times."

And if I may say, my test group for the last 4 years have been the wonderful guys and girls at coull.com and not all of them are (or have been) techies either. We may be a technology company, but technology companies have their share of noobs in their workforces too :)

Two things really, Gerard, if you return to this post, thanks for the comment. My apologies for not replying to your comment. I was a bit overwhelmed by my comment being made into a blog post, that threw me for a loop. And all because about a week ago I joined twitter and started following Tom and made a tweet at him :) I have followed Tom for a while now, after our CEO sent me an interesting article Tom wrote (memory does not serve which). However, I have commented on Tom's blog a number of times as he raises interesting topics, but never before have I achieved the honor of having a comment published as a post!

twitter - a flash in the pan?

I have been thinking that twitter's shelf life may be limited. I made a comment over on glennhilton's blog - twitter article - about the similarities of IRC of the old days and twitter. Glenn, interestingly enough is someone I have discovered on twitter in the last week, actually I think he found me, not that it matters. It is a very disruptive technology.

Which brings me to a few predictions:

1) twitter is going to be the next big corporate no go site, if it is not already. The rational behind this is that I have been on it for a week and it is already increasing my workload. Indeed some interesting things have come from it, but it has made a difference to my time management during the past week, it has disrupted it. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that needs to be balanced. twitter, could indeed eat up employees time. Which actually makes a case for blocking it, however I still believe it is more positive overall to allow them access and let users assume responsibility and manage their time, just like those of us not under restrictions.

2) twitter's current model is great, its drawcard somewhat different from facebook, et al. It does seem to connect you to all sorts of people, you would never have connected with before. However, the downside of twitter is the time management issue. twitter is realtime and therefore to keep up to date, you have to give it a fair amount of time. Right now it is novel and it is more than probable that it is being driven more by the new poeple joining. That said, I think it is going to be hard for twitter users to maintain the realtime constant updates over the medium term. It is going to have change as people cannot constantly be thinking of things to post up. It reminds me of the facebook wall, just different. It is a great service and very interesting networking tool. I wonder how long it will keep our attention? Will turn into just "marketing ideas" to followers, "hey check this out"?

I honestly wonder how will they deal with this fairly significant (possible) issue in twitter's current model. I hesitantly guess that it may be quite hard to do so. How our own usage of twitter will evolve is something unknown. However, we can hazard a guess. I think unless Biz and boys have another disruptive drawcard up their sleeves twitter may be a bit of a flash in the pan (relatively speaking). Goodness, did I just say that... well on the surface this is going to be issue, that and we get bored quickly. twitter, has two enemies, our fickle nature and its own nature.

I personally think that twitter's realtime search is a gold mine waiting to mined. I am not certain that it will remain that way for the long term (because of the above stated reasons), however right now, realtime search in twitter is fairly unique.

Monday morning thoughts...