A number of people from all over the planet are starting to reassess the usefulness of twitter. While on the cover, it might not seem all that useful, in actuality it can be for highly mobile workers, and for help desk folks that can work with the system. Now of course there needs to be a secure twitter as an app in the company to make the vision happen, but realistically, microblogging has a lot of similarity to very old style communications that were limited to one or two lines of text.

Fastforward blog is talking about an IBM Web 2.0 Guru, and there is an article on ITToolbox from Help Desk Samurai that talks about the same concepts.

One thing we may be learning is that “collaboration” is not the only, maybe not even the main, software-supported social application. I.e., neither wikis nor blogs even begin to exhaust the field of enterprise social software. We may be about to figure out that they really aren’t even central to the field. Perhaps it’s the kind of connections that have potential for serendipity that are the greatest untapped resource within the social potential of the enterprise. Source: Fastforward

The idea of using twitter to do communications from point A to point B using twitter or a twitter like process for simple IM communications in the business environment is actually a fairly good idea. That way the IM Via Cell phone can be done on corporate equipment or controlled equipment and help maintain the activities or coordination of help desk or other personnel that might not be that available.

This also makes sense for remote workers with cell phone based internet access, to pick up reports and other materials when they are not on line or visiting the customer. Consider it a blackberry on steroids all using the twitter backend to arrange and control communications. If twitter can be turned into a local appliance to manage intercorporate communications and updates.