Earlier this year I saw this picture (from Sapphire) with the words SAP, Innovation, Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise social networking together and it got me thinking.

A couple of weeks later, during one of the recent Twitter downtimes, some of us ran to the newly started Plurk, to let the world know what we were doing.
Of course that wasn’t so easy without an API in place, so that didn’t last long.
It was however just enough time for ESME - Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment - to be born.

ESME started off from one Plurk conversations (or here as RSS).
Now 20 days later, the project has already come so far, that the architecture and design ideas are being discussed in detail.

What I have found interesting and fun in this process, is that we have only used microblogging and collaboration tools to plan this project. Not once did we call each other or use IM.
20 people from all over the world have put their names on the ESME SDN wiki page (even though some are involved as “listeners”), so logistically it has not been an easy task.

Though through using tweets with a 140 character limitation and the wiki when we needed to go into details, we have built an architecture, the foundations of UIs we want to use, the implementation, discuss the social network aspects and think of scenarios where such a tool would be useful.
If someone had told me even just a year ago, that something like this would be possible, I probably would have laughed at them..
This has been an amazing experience so far, and I hope this is just the beginning!

“The replies tab remains disabled today as we rework some of the queries that were causing problems yesterday. This has also been reflected in the sidebar of the status blog for the web features.
One way you can see replies directed to you is to search on Summize. You can search for “to:username” to see all updates directed at you.”

Twitter now encourages us to use third-party services, for functionalities they cannot deliver themselves anymore.

I know they have partnered with Summize before, for instance during Steve Job’s recent keynote (you can read about it here), to reduce their database load.

But this time they are outsourcing a basic functionality of their own system, which makes me wonder what is left of what Twitter once was?

By now, realizing that IM and Track will still be offline a while, all I wish for is an API that allows 70 req/hour again. I feel like half-a-person without the tweets trickling into Twitterrific/Growl.

Twitter have one of the most open APIs around, and I also think this was part of their recent headaches. (getting crushed by API calls)
We all gave our Twitter credentials to any third-party app that came along and looked interesting. We had a zillion different Twitter clients, Twitter search, Twitter karma services and we wanted to try it all out.

A while ago I listened to the Gillmor Gang discussing Twitter once again.
We all know Steve’s “obsession” with Track, so part of the conversation somehow got lost, and I haven’t been able to stop reflecting about this part ever since.

Chris Messina brought this up while discussing OAuth:

” So, you don’t actually have specific control to say, “I want to turn off access from Twitterific.”… You know, it’s like Flickr provides a great model of how you can turn on and off access from different services. This is just an example of one of the things that if we had it, I think Twitter would not only be providing greater value, but it would be demonstrating a level of user control over the use of this system that would actually be, I think, leading to greater resilience.”

I don’t know why this model haven’t been discussed.
I can only speak for myself, but in light of the recent problems, I would happily turn off Twitter access to at all the different services and clients I have tried out in the last months. I don’t even know myself anymore how many apps and services receive my tweets.

Implementing a flickr-like model, where you can see which third-party applications you are using and remove the permission for these if necessary, would be fantastic.
As a user it is a great way to control where your credentials go and it wouldn’t hurt Twitter’s API either.

It is now possible to watch the technical sessions online here.

There are 77 videos all together, and they cover a wide range of subjects.
AJAX and JavaScript, Maps and Geo, Social applications, APIs and Tools and, finally, Mobile are all represented. What I found most interesting were the videos about Android, this introduction for instance or Inside the Android Application Framework.