During the last months we at Communardo have experimented a lot with social software – and in fact also through the last 7 years before. Wikis, blogs & co. have played a mayor role in our customer engagements (e.g. for Intranet 2.0) but also in our internal IT-landscape. Especially, in our own practice we sense a rising demand to professionalize the use of micro-content like short messages, notes, hints & tipps, hyperlinks. E-mail, instant messaging and personal folders are just not the right place to store these bits of information with stedily growing importance.

The idea, just to use twitter or some kind of logged instant messaging is equally charming but not suitable. Whereas the strength of twitter.com lies in the building and up-keeping of social and professional networks an in PR and marketing it is – at least in our opinion – not really usable for enterprise use. Instead of following a people-centric approach (“follow”) we are focusing on topic-centric communication. We think that this suites better the needs in our business world. We need at least some amount of order and structure just as we need discretion and access control and persistent storage of content. This is what we miss at twitter.com and its accompanying services.

This is the reason why a team of software engineers at Communardo has started a project to develop an own microblogging platform. We have been inspired by first tests of project blogs based on wordpress with the Prologue Theme and by the possibilities of Ajax & Co. in the frontend as well as Java in the backend to build a company-wide communications platform that allows for topic-centric microblogging.

Recently, Microblogging has been a trendy topic, in particular when it comesto enterprise use of microblogging. But why should this mostly public exchange of short messages revolutionize the business world?

The enthusiasm of the web 2.0 community for this topic may easily lead to the assumption that this is a new hype. Virtually every couple of days a new microblogging services is launched, especially for enterprise use. For instance, Yammer.com won the TechCrunch50 Award. Jeremiah Owyang published an Overview of Twitter-tools for the intranet that is beeing continously extended by commentators. A little analysis shows that tools like yammer either just copy the basic principles of Twitter.com or at least try to adapt them to business use.

What are the reasons to believe in sustainable success of microblogging in the enterprises?