Twitter: The Enterprise's Non-Story

Twitter's lack of enterprise steam could be instructive for emerging techs. We said it before. And we said it again. And for good measure, we beat it over your head: Twitter isn't ready for the enterprise.

Maybe it will be one day, but not yet. For the latest demonstration, check out Clint Boulton's piece on Dell's apparent failure using Twitter. And give Clint a lot of credit for not being too hard on the microblogging service (since that seems to be everybody's inclination, given their less-than-stellar headlines of late):

Right now Twitter is what it is: an extremely basic communications tool that lets users sound off, but it sure is fun. I've asked co-founder Biz Stone before if Twitter had designs on targeting the enterprise. The answer was no, but that doesn't mean others can't leverage Twitter as a communications tool for business. Dell's effort was a step in that direction.

I asked Stone the same question last summer, and he gave me the same answer. "There are plenty of tools for getting work done that are more sophisticated than Twitter," he added.

Sure, Twitter didn't start out with grand enterprise ambitions, but there's certainly a place in the business community for tweets. Now, if someone could just find it...

(It's also worth mentioning that microblogging made Gartner's latest Hype Cycle for emerging technologies; snazzy little graphic here.

Is your business using Twitter for anything? Or do you still view it as a consumer app?