Migrations: Project Management
So, you use Twitter and are yelling into space that you just flushed the toilet. Who gives a damn? Your boss should.
Twitter is one thing and one thing only: A status reporting service. And that is all it needs to be.
I have analyzed, designed, developed and implemented project management systems over my entire 25 year career. When I look at Twitter, I see gold–not gold–diamonds.
One of the biggest challenges for the project manager is status estimates and actuals. Twitter provides a platform for immediately updating both. It would allow project team members to enter estimates and actuals on the fly in real time. Calendaring and timesheets could become obsolete. Twitter could drive projects, payrolls and billing, inventories, transactions, heuristics and algorithms dynamically by doing one thing, reporting status.
All a business has to do is create Twitter business accounts for all its suppliers, employees, distributors, even customers and then follow their business tweets. Plug them into Project Management: Instant ROI.
Every single Twitter to date has just been a bunch of playing with Twitter technology. But status is at the heart of all business planning and tracking.
Trees: Multimedia Networks
Yes, status reporting is all you can produce as a node, however the other product is you can link those nodes and the statuses themselves and statuses are of an array of media types now which can also be linked. I think Barabasi’s book “Linked” is very relevant here: http://blog.grantczerepak.com/2009/01/20/barabasi-scale-free-networks/. Tweets are not stand alone statuses, tweets are now multimedia status networks. Call them “twigs”, “branches”, “trunks” and “trees”. A gaant chart is a means of viewing that network. People, Media, Events, Locations, Reasons, Methods, Currency are an accepted ontology for the types of statuses that can be linked. These could be called “flocks”, “tweets”, “seasons”, “nests”, “migrations”, “rituals” and “eggs” respectively. And they are all in trees.
A gaant chart is a “project management tree”.
Eggonomics: Gratitude, Sharing and Caring
But Twitter, to be fully realized as a business application has to develop one thing more, an economy.
We should make it possible for everyone to set the price of their tweets as easy as possible.
If you want to tweet for free, just set the default to zero. However, if you come up with a goody it should be just as easy to set a tweet price, egg value, you want.
If Google can make it possible to display and bid on advertising on the scale they have set up, it would be just as easy for Twitter to make all “flocks”, “tweets”, “seasons”, “nests”, “migrations”, “rituals” and “trees” valuable monetarily in “eggs”.
What is an ad but a tweet?
The result would be a global circulation of capital that would make international free trade in Twitter a major contributor to a new economy.
Twittering does not want to be free. Twittering wants to have the price the market will bear. And you and I and everyone should see the value in gratitude (acknowledgment and credit), sharing (advertising, pro bono and branding for identity) and caring (buying and selling for sustainability) through Twitter.
Need and want are different. There is nothing wrong with taking all you need from the world, that is gratitude. Taking less than you want is sharing. Giving what you want is caring.
You have just had the Twitter future revealed to you. You have seen it here and heard it from me. First.
Grant Czerepak
