I must also voice the thought to those who don’t feel that this emerging form of communication would not be valuable to IT; wouldn’t IT benefit from a system that broadcasts and responds in groups over stationary & mobile platforms in real time? Wouldn’t the feedback gathered and the time sensitive nature of business be helpful? If something was wrong with your product (or right), wouldn’t you like to use track to find out ASAP if people were talking about it so you could do something about it?

Look beyond what people are eating…

On relevance to the enterprise, don’t you think there are a couple different things going on here? There’s the business intelligence piece (especially for consumer-facing companies), the value of which, as you mention, the Twitter guys are all too well aware of.

Then there’s the employee and partner messaging aspect, which could be useful in different ways, whether it’s used to talk to the world, or in a more private way. I could see an intranet hack with something like tinyurls linking not just to websites but also to docs on a file server inside an enterprise.

If you look at micro blogging as the “horse race” Twitter has a comfortable lead. The conversational track functionality, however, depends on a smaller number of users in what can be called a discoverable cloud. Here, Twirl’s role as an aggregator/reader of not just Twitter but FriendFeed and Summize’s clouds allows Track-centric users to maintain their existing relationships while cherry picking the follow social graph to transfer the real-time value of the combined cloud. In effect, Twhirl becomes a validator of Identi.ca at a vulnerable moment for Twitter. I find it more than coincidental the similarity to the rise of RSS at the dawn of Web services, which arguably has had a powerful resonance in the still continuing roiling of enterprise architecture.

Seems to me that IT professionals would be the very audience for this information. Redundancy, ways to move — no, PUSH — information to respective interested parties would be right up enterprise’s alley.

Twitters success is one of brand mindshare and technical solutions to its’ perceived problems go nowhere to capture that ground. Look to the Facebook/Myspace clones to appreciate how this is not going to happen.