Social computing in enterprise software - leveraging Twitter like microblogging capabilities

Twitter was buzzing with posts on the recent L.A earthquake nine minutes before AP officially broke the news. This Twitter phenomenon once again proved that unintended consequences are always larger than intended consequences. As we would have never imagined people find amusing ways of using Twitter ranging from keeping buddies updated and getting caught drinking when they called in sick and the boss followed their tweets to ensue wave of media coverage to get out of jail. A recent proposal to use Twitter as an emergency system met with stark criticism citing Twitter's availability issues. I don't see this as an "either or" proposition. The answer is "and" and not "yes, but". Let's use Twitter for what it is worth. It's a great microblogging and crowdsourcing tool to tap into the wisdom of crowd with a very little overhead and almost no barrier to entry.

Enterprise software should seriously consider this social computing phenomenon and leverage its capabilities by integrating such a tool in their offerings. For instance a social CRM application can use such a tool to help sales people effectively follow, collaborate, and close opportunities. The customer support system can provide transparency into the defect resolution process by service representatives tweeting the progress instead of logging it in semi-static IT ticket systems.

Following individual tweets has its obvious advantages but correlating multiple tweets could be extremely powerful and could yield to interesting nontraditional usage models such as using it to run predictive markets, sentiment analysis, or to track a recall on salmonella tainted tomatoes in real-time.