Microblogging as a tool for better team communication

Some ideas start in charming ways. Yesterday a colleague came over to ask if I happened to have a charger for his phone. While he was there, he asked what I, as a veteran blogger, thought of using microblogging to improve communication between teams. At first I didn’t understand what he was asking. Then he explained that Twitter, which he could see on my laptop screen, was an example.

If you’re unfamiliar with Twitter, I recommend this series. I’ve borrowed the following description from it.

Twitter is instant messaging, a tool for exchanging messages right away, available through a website. You can post messages called tweets of up to 140 characters. When you follow someone on Twitter, you can read their messages. When people follow you, they can read yours.

If you work in a larger team, as I do, sometimes it’s hard to make a quick announcement or share something interesting with colleagues. Maybe you’ve found a useful tool or an interesting article. Maybe you’re about to make a major change and aren’t sure about the side effects. You could send it to the shared mailing list, but not everyone will care. The head of our center probably isn’t interested in a new Maven release. A blog post takes too much work, and the information usually doesn’t need that much explanation anyway.

Microblogging is a great compromise between an email and a full blog post. I’ve seen it compared to texting over the internet. Everyone who follows you sees the message, so you don’t bother a lot of other people who probably aren’t interested in what you have to say.

In our case, a Twitter-like system could be integrated with our development tools. Sometimes you break a build. The build server can show who broke it, but it can’t show whether that person is working on it. A Twitter-like system could show whether the person is fixing it or even knows what happened. There could be a button beside a broken build that automatically creates a tweet. The build server, in turn, could associate tweets with broken builds.

I’m very much in favor of using microblogging for communication between teams. As on Twitter, behind closed doors inside a company you’ll get stars most people follow and passive users almost nobody follows. That creates a natural balance. Important information from people who have something to say reaches everyone, while less important information goes only to the few people interested.