Enterprise Project Management and Social Networking: To Tweet or not to Tweet?

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It has been interesting to track the latest Project Management buzz about Twitter during the past few weeks; Tony Zink definitely raised the Project Server bar with this post today: Use Twitter to Track Tasks and Time in Project Server 2007. Please find below a summary of recent blog posts on this topic as well as my feedback so far after using it for the past few weeks. So far I do see value in the Twibe but it will take time to master this new medium. Try it out yourself, it’s fun!

Latest Project Management and Twitter blog posts:

My experience: from Newsgroups, to LinkedIn, to Blog, to FaceBook, and now Twitter…

When I joined Microsoft in 2001, I started to follow and participate in Newsgroups (mainly French newsgroups focused on Microsoft Technologies), then I joined LinkedIn but did not use it much then. In 2006 right before the public launch of Project Server 2007 I saw a need to share knowledge to the outside world about the new version and started blogging on MSDN. Back in September 2007 I moved to Redmond and wanted to keep track of friends and started using FaceBook as a personal networking platform. Since 2001 I have been a frequent user of Messenger to communicate with friends and relatives and since 2005 also a frequent use of Office Communicator to chat with internal MSFT contacts. Then three weeks ago I decided to try Twitter and see how can it help with my day to day job. I’m still mastering Twitter but so far my findings are these:

  • Feels like a gigantic Messenger/FaceBook status limited to 140 characters
  • Twitter really lights up with a third party application, I using TweetDeck and dDule so far, but none clearly stands out
  • Twitter entries are not indexed by your favorite search engine and the above applications have limited historical search capabilities so I guess Twitter has a very different timeframe that a good old blog post
  • Depending on the day/time, Twitter feels like a combinations of newsgroup questions and answers (a lot more interactive with faces of participants for instance), Messenger status update and good old email: Outlook
  • Similar to the net and other social networking applications mentioned earlier, I see a lots of noise out there, including continuous spam; it takes time to fine tune the signal to get valuable information
  • it would be great to have a single rich desktop application (with a SilverLight UI) to track Twitter, Newsgroups, LinkedIn (I keep FaceBook for personal stuff at this stage)
  • Windows Live Writer Twitter Notify plug-in makes it a lot easier to keep both world (blog and Twibe together)
  • Twitting is similar to blogging and if you have been blogging for a while it will be easy to cross the chasm and apply blogging best practices (with respect to content) to Twitter
  • My first and last name are too long for Twitter :)

Where are the Microsoft Project MVPs?

It looks like Twitter is still in its infancies with respect to the Microsoft Project MVP community since not too many have an account (in particular non-US MVPs), Bud Ratliff is leading the pack with 192 updates. The latest addition to the Twibe is Bilal Okour (blog post I am twittering now! follow me or I will follow you).

Other resources I found surfing among many:

 

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