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Sky News is installing Twitter client Tweetdeck as default software across journalists computers to encourage and integrate social media for newsgathering and reporting, as revealed by Journalism.co.uk.

It will be on all staff computers within a month, and as part of the move, Sky’s ‘Twitter Correspondant’ Ruth Barnett will move to Sky’s Westminster bureau. Since her appointment, around 90 staff have their own Twitter accounts, and the idea is to no longer ‘ghettoise’ it as the role of one person.

Sky already publish a feed from Sky News @SkyNews, and @SkyNewsBreak, which reveals breaking news before it’s even made it onto the main website.
“There aren’t so many users as Facebook, but they are deeply engaged and it can be applied in so many ways,” Executive Producer Julian March told Journalism.co.uk.

What’s interesting is that this is an official announcement and policy for all staff – many organisations are already using Tweetdeck or similar tools on an unofficial basis – usually requested on an individual basis. Certainly many of my colleagues at Absolute Radio have been using Tweetdeck for ages, while I currently use Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop together for two different purposes to avoid mistakenly cross-tweeting. Still others I’ve spoken to are using web-based solutions such as Splitweet, removing the need for downloads and installation.

The announcement is also good timing for Tweetdeck, which has just rolled out a new version of its iPhone app, countering some of the publicity around the acquisition of Ping.fm by Seesmic. Official corporate adoption is going to be just one of the measures in the popularity and success of Twitter clients as we enter a period of serious consolidation by the main players.

I’m obviously a big fan of microblogging, having started this site with a few good people. And yet the current buzz around the concept does bring some of the problems to the forefront.

For starters, how fragmented will my identity become? I already have another blog, a profile on LinkedIn, a profile on a group magazine project, a profile on Facebook, one on Myspace, and one on Twitter. And that’s just the main sites I use on a day-to-day basis. And any reasonable input into microblogging requires a lot of time – enough to have an effect on the blogging output of a lot of people. Although surprisingly it can have a positive effect.

But until now, Twitter has been synonymous with microblogging. But with new challengers coming every day, is it really possible to comprehensively update:

• Twitter
• Plurk
• Twoorl
• Identi.ca
• Globme
• Jaiku
• Pownce

And still have time to check other comments on Friendfeed and Socialthing?

You can always try cross publishing, and the number of posts brought to you by services like Ping.fm has radically increased. But is it really worth autofeeding yourself across so many networks? In the early stages the same early adopters will inhabit most of these sites, so you’re likely to be bombing most of the same people several times.

Or you can try and manually update each site, and unless you’re able to multitask to the nth degree, you can drive yourself insane within a week.

Luckily the answer to the problem will arrive eventually in the self-selection of the main sites. And that will simply come down to where the groups of friends exist. That’s why I think Twitter is secure for quite a while longer, as most people will have already reached a critical mass of connections that they won’t find on the other networks yet.

The issue it does raise, is a wider one, on how many different identities and personas are possible around an individual with even a wide sphere of influence and a lot of spare time – and where will that time come from?