140Char

A really useful article by Laura Fitton (@pistachio) on Mashable comparing 15 microblogging tools for enterprises also reveals an important and interesting quote on Twitter from Ev Williams. ( Laura has kindly clarified in the comments that she referenced the list of tools maintained by Jeremiah Owyang)

‘Private networks that do private or company-internal sharing via Twitter are on the horizon,’

This is big news considering the size of Twitter relative to all other microblogging platforms. I’d suggest their advantage is to create the private areas within the larger Twittersphere, as one of the problems of tools such as Yammer is that for normal businesses (i.e. non early-adopter tech firms), there simply isn’t critical mass.

Allow early adopters to connect within a company, and frame that within the larger Twittersphere, and it keeps the interest up while allowing the company users to grow.

(Then again, if it’s coming at the same speed as restoring IM functionality etc, it may be some way off!)