Remember the search interfaces of yester-years? Pulldowns, check boxes, and operands defined the experience until Google stripped it all away. The exposed input box felt naked next to its companions. Yet the babe had brawn. Over the years the ubiquitous search box came to dominate content retrieval because of its simplicity, expressiveness, and relative clairvoyance. You typed some text in, Google rewarded you with a best guess of information you must have been looking for.
Our utterly selfish "give me" relationship with Google quickly earned Google medals in advertising. We were still putting enough "in" to Google's Engine for it to quasi-cleverly match up your key words with the highest-bidding, and content-relevant advertiser.
Spin up to today and we have a similar input box delivering 140 characters of further indulgence. "Give me" seemed to evolve social consciousness into an "I am". Our passive-aggressive social cloud is bloated with micro-summaries of people's whereabouts, whatchados, grandiose plans colored by nuance and mediocrity. And what with it? Nothing. Or rather nothing much.
Those still riding the web2.0-enabled Collaboration and Productivity opportunities are escaping email for what they hope to be a Twitter-gendered repose from Info Glut. But this is naivete. Every medium for communication will only alleviate over-saturated predecessors until usage turns into abuse-age. A much savvier colleague of mine had an insight that, paraphrased, in the consumer world, Twitter creates communication where it does not already exist. In the workplace, however, we are trying to better direct our information traffic, to reduce abuse, to improve relevancy, and tune interruption.
Twitter is a cloud of unstructured data. This data is time sensitive. A classical use case is "What am I doing now?". Stretched a bit we can evolve to "I am planning something right now that I will do shortly" and "I have just done something stranger and friends alike should know about".
As is, this glorified presence system is prime for integration with our Instant Messaging Clients' Status Notes or Away Message. But this is not very exciting. As the significance of any single Twitter fades with passing seconds into oblivion, what are we, the Information Workers, gaining from such an exchange? A Status Feed is great, but really, just the tip of the ice berg.
Sometimes actual Knowledge is Twittered. For example, "I just read a great article on Silverlight about Animations at http://..." or "Firebug just crashed on me after visiting a site with Google Ads again!".
The first sample is clearly relevant to people interested in Silverlight. The second is clearly a bug report and a stability alarm. Perhaps unfiltered noise in the consumer cloud but in the Enterprise access to these streams of consciousness is the very essence of the next generation's competitive edge.
And so Twitter must become the reversed flow of Google-like search.
In the Enterpise, search blankets our repositories and knowledge bases, constructing a uniform way for retrieval. Twitters (micro-content, really) must be deconstructed and filed back in. To be able to distinguish Status from Knowledge and to create on-demand availability of this type of information mashed up with related information is the cosmic pixie dust of the future.
Speaking of the future, Twitter recently acquired Values of n for I Want Sandy, a personal digital secretary. If Twitters about "right now" generate Knowledge then Twitters about the future must generate Activities. Activities produce Knowledge: more Twitters, CRM information, documents, blog posts, etc. When all this information is accounted for it truly seems that the personal Digital Assistant need not be so personal after all.
To move beyond this "give me" towards a notion of Coordinated Intelligence, we will need to embrace Semantics, Context, Community-friendly Knowledge Management strategies, and that bit of nakedness. I'll race you there.
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