Twitter can now be useful for enterprise IT folks

There have been two serious problems keeping Twitter from being of much use to enterprise IT folks:

1. Major drawbacks in stability and usability.
2. Lack of enterprise IT discussion, with a focus instead on online marketing types trying to be more popular with each other.

Neither, however, is as bad as it used to be.  E.g., major downtime or inexcusable turning-off of major features, while not exactly things of the past, are much reduced.  And Twitter spam isn't a killer problem either.

Actually, I've only identified one significant enterprise IT community on Twitter so far, specifically in the area of business intelligence.  (Plus a second quasi-enterprise one for technology-in-schools.)  I don't know whether there are others.  Searching on obvious keywords such as Oracle, database, or SAP isn't terribly encouraging -- but searches on BI terms wouldn't easily have turned up the BI group I'm referring to either. That said, Twitter is a proven tool to:

• Keep in touch with people with business interests similar to yours
• Get quick advice on technical matters

and I don't see why that shouldn't work in the enterprise IT area as well.

Helping tip the scales, there finally are some useful tools for Twitter as well. Most of the Twitter clients -- such as the overly popular Tweetdeck -- are ridiculous, or else focused specifically on people who want to spend all day watching tweets go by.  In the past few days, however, Michael Arrington has called attention to two new tools, and I can endorse both of them.

TwitApps is a simple service that emails you notification of @replies.  Knowing when you are @replied to on Twitter is huge, since it's the essence of keeping conversations going.  For the first time (that I know of), it is possible to stay well-engaged with Twitter without actually checking the core service in an obsessive, disruptive way.

Power Twitter is a Firefox plug-in that does a few things.  One nice one is to expand URLs in tweets -- apparently the default is to something like HTML page titles -- and make them readable.  The other is to make search boxes more convenient, although the utility of this is limited by the generally  unrewarding nature of Twitter search.

Bottom line:  If you're a sufficiently inquisitive IT person to be reading this blog, and you're not yet engaged with Twitter, it may be time to check the service out.