140Char

This is the first post by new contributor Lauren Fisher, who specialises in online PR and social media at Simply Zesty – and can be found on Twitter at @laurenfisher.

New site Twingr offers the chance to set up your own microblogging community on a hosted platform – unlike previous options like Laconi.ca, which required you to install the service on your own server.

It seems like a no brainer, but I think there’s one major flaw in the service – critical mass.

One of the successful implentations of Laconica, is Leo Laporte’s TWiT Army, fed from the TWiT Netcast Network, and therefore having enough of a community and interaction to ensure a reasonably constant flow of updates. Meanwhile, there are several options for corporate enterprise solutions, notably Yammer, as a hosted microblogging platform.

But Twingr is external facing, and relies on people wanting to create a group fo sufficient interactivity to seperate itself from the crowd – yet not wanting to host the service, and therefore removing any options to monetise it.

For those small groups, a more general service like Ning would probably offer more scope for interaction, allowing you to upload images and files etc, as well as messaging and forums, meaning a stronger community from a smaller number of participants.

And there’s also no scope to check out and join existing groups, meaning that duplication and confusion may lead to ever smaller splinter groups – is there a need for microblogging for a group of 5 friends who already communicate via IM, Twitter, Facebook etc?

Having said that, if you’re interested, here’s the introductory video – and if you do use it, I’d be really interested in hearing how you get on:

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!)

Well, I expressed reservations about how many organisations would find use from Techcrunch 50 winner Yammer, and have a strange feeling that in many cases I might be proved right.

For example, the corporate Yammer group I’m in has 11 members, a few unanswered invites, and a three day gap between posts. Three days should not pass between posts on a microblog, particularly when it was only me posting for the last four days! And that’s despite a few of my usual web geek colleagues popping up.

Compare that to my Tweetstats, despite being pretty busy over the last few days. Part of the reason is that, like Johnny Five in Short Circuit, I need input. Yammer almost seems like a training pool before venturing into the Olympic pool with the grown-ups on Twitter. And that’s regardless of the fact Yammer has opened up it’s API.

There’s quite an interesting post by Chris Brogan on how the Twhirl client support for the open source, on your own servers Twitter, Laconi.ca, means that Yammer is irrelevant.

Incidentally, after Del.icio.us became delicious.com, it seems really strange to see identi.ca, laconi.ca, present.ly (the other corporate microblogging offering) etc!

I was going to use the Twit (This Week In Tech) Army example of self-hosted microblogging, but with comedy timing, the site appears to be down!

There have been lots of reports on the Techcrunch50 startup conference/competition, and lots of coverage of Yammer winning the top prize.

It takes the Twitter model, and asks ‘What are you working on’ for enterprise, so a private Twitter for companies. It’s free to use for employees, but the business model kicks in if a company wants to claim their network and get administrative tools to remove messages and users, set password policies, or set IP ranges for who can use it.

So far so good – as always, I’m reserving my judgement until I get to sit and play with it – which I’m about to start doing for a fun little project. One of my main concerns is about the scale of take-up. A comparison between Facebook and Twitter shows microblogging is far from ubiquitous.

With this in mind, will there be enough scale within enough companies to make it worthwhile for companies, and also to show enough revenue to make sense? The natural audience is in the global technology companies, but beyond that, it might be somewhat limited as a mechanism for people with 6 employees signed up and the rest ignoring it.

It will also be intriguing to see how it works across departments, and particularly across verticals. Will people interact in a meaningful way if the management are seeing every message (Yam?). Will it lead to decisions becoming slowed by  Death by Committee as everyone seeks to put in their opinion?

For me, there are too many questions to predict whether it will be successful or not. Within a large UK organisation I’ve seen Facebook rocket in popularity for social use but fail to get traction for business use. Meanwhile LinkedIn has again grown, but as a tool for external contacts rather than questions and interaction. One company in one country isn’t exactly a representative survey, but even within the hardcore of early adopters who embrace social networking (and indeed microblogging), I’m not sure there’s enough conversation to necessitate Yammer over email/instant messaging/forums.

Still the $50,000 Techcrunch prize is more money than a lot of social networks have achieved, so they’re off to a good start!