For a while now, I’ve been checking out Twitter to see how people are using it from a business standpoint. This may deviate somewhat from the original purpose, but I’m noticing that more businesses are using it. This is what I’ve concluded.
Twitter provides a fast way to disseminate information and announcements to many users at once. The compressed tweet size (140 characters) enables you to write a phrase or headline, and provide a link as well if need be. Users can then scan their tweets and look into an item more if they’d like. What’s also nice is that you can click on a particular feed and see a list of updates for that person or entity. Talk about a great way to automatically sort messages!
I imagine that this will be an integral component of documentation down the road, as I believe docs will be more interactive. Twitter could at least be used for, say, announcements about a new section. Or doc departments could use it to set up a dropbox feed for user comments. Using tweets to directly add content would, I think, require more planning to accommodate content management and reuse requirements. How useful that application may be remains to be seen.
I’m sure there’s more. For now, I’ll keep using Twitter, seeing how others are doing so, and think of ways to incorporate it into docs.