Twitter for work updates

Question

If you are sending work/progress reports to the project lead on a daily or weekly basis, I wondered if you would consider using Twitter or similar services for this updates.

Say if you're working remotly or with a distributed team and the project lead has a hard time getting an overview about the topics people are working and where the issues/time consumers are, would you set up some private accounts (or even a private company-internal service) to broadcast progress updates to your colleagues?

edit Thanks for the link to those products, but do you already use one of it in your company too? For real-life professional use?

Answer 1

Look at http://www.yammer.com for a corporate version of twitter.

Answer 2

What about confidentiality and information security? I'm certain a company run IM service would be a better alternative.

I've viewed Twitter and similar services to be used as marketing tools to engage customers and prospects.

Answer 3

Try Laconica: An open source Twitter-like system you could run on your own servers.

Answer 4

Or, the layer above Laconica called Identi.ca There's a good talk with the founder of Identi.ca about such usage over at IT Conversations.

Answer 5

Maybe try campfire or basecamp.

Answer 6

The Prologue theme for WordPress was designed with this in mind.

Answer 7

Many of my colleagues are posting work updates on Twitter, being careful not to disclose company confidential information. From those working on open commercial development projects, I've even seen Twitter updates indicating which work item they were working on. Coolness.

Answer 8

We use Laconica on my team, it's very useful for those updates that you want to send to the whole team but aren't really worth wasting an email on.

Since only my team is using the installation of Laconica that we have, I take the RSS for the public feed and I integrated that into SharePoint.

So while the developers and PM's on our team use Twhirl to manage sending and recieving updates, management is still able to see the updates directly on our team site.

It's quite transparent in that nobody actually has to go to the Laconica instance I have setup to do anything except initially register.

Check out this post for information on how I integrated Laconica with SharePoint: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/107872/how-can-i-integrate-laconica-update-stream-into-sharepoint

Answer 9

I can see the appeal of using twitter in this way. Where I work, we send a daily project "snapshot" to basically everyone else in the company. As the company grows (we are nearing 35 employees now), this is becoming a bit of a burden to read through (or at the very least file/delete) all the status emails as they arrive. I don't know that I could see Twitter replacing these emails, however, because these emails are not necessarily supposed to tell someone when something is completed, but rather to tell someone what it is I'm working on today, and what my upcoming projects are in the future.

I guess most of our project updates are actually done more frequently in person. For larger projects, we now employ what's referred to as a "burndown". This basically means we gather for a quick re-estimation of how much work is left on a project, which then results in a nice graph that should show whether the project is on track or not.

We do also throw in the occasional email when there's something more immediate, or if someone isn't available for discussion/notification.

Answer 10

I would consider what the reports were meant to accomplish, and then discover a solution that accentuated that objective without being a logistical nightmare :)

Twitter might only be appropriate if the updates had a short shelf life, and if scattering them among other updates wasn't destructive.

There's also a question of confidentiality on any 3rd party service like this.

Answer 11

Check out https://presentlyapp.com/