We're developing something that can (in the 1st use case) be seen as an auto discovery mechanism in extended network environments. The initial questions is: "Does anyone know why this sales portal is performing badly, users are reverting to manual input?" That's in an SAP environment (We thought we'd start somewhere easy ) but can go out to the whole network.

ESME (as we call it) though we know say Project Harpoon (as in the Fail Whale) seeks to address that in a massively scalable way by using a combination of auto created groups based on tag clouds generated in different ways.

To Vinnie's point – yep – I'm not saying otherwise, but I really want a single point of access to all the breadcrumbs people in whom I'm interested are leaving. Twitter allows me that cos people can autopost their stuff there and I can pick up accordingly.

An alternative is FriendFeed but I'm not sure I really like that as much, even though I can get threaded conversations there which I can't at Twitter and which also has a neat iPhone app with FFToGo.

rss_icon©Vanvan Chen

RSS is everywhere nowadays, you can hardly find a web service that doesn’t publish some kind of feed, showing your activity within the service.

For quite some time now, many people rely on feed readers to aggregate th…

Dennis, you know what delights me – hits on 1-2-3 year old posts of mine. I am prouder of my "evergreen" stuff than "breaking news" kind of stuff.

So RSS is not dead, and neither is Google search or links from other bloggers who I respect and link to and they link to mine…to me a balanced set of readers across these "channels" is important…

Ironically, I saw the benefits of Twitter much more when I got a client for the iPhone – if I had lots of friends or colleagues using it, I can see now how it might enable me to stay in touch much better. But it really is a microtrend: if you're part of the 1% of the population that does it, it's brilliant; for everyone else, it's utterly mystifying.

I would be fascinated by enterprise twitter. How would it go beyond a system of notifications ("I've finished the paint job, vanishing can start at 15:45") or a short-format chat room ("Lisa in HR is pregnant again")? I'm the first to admit I have limited vision for these sorts of things, but like a lot of people my age, the volume and abruptness of the messages on twitter-type systems just puts me right off – so I'd love to know how it gets over that hump (or whether I'm just developing generational mind-plaque).

That's why I'm involved in a project to develop enterprise Twitter. Only tied to process and to auto-discovery.

What I DIDN'T say is that RSS readers have lost their utility. I still use GReader but not as much as I used to.

@marzy/@Richard: How many people use iPhones? When's it going to penetrate business?

At the end of the day, we tend to go where the conversations are happening that are important to us. In that sense, I am definitely an edgling.

@Dennis – do you ever wonder whether there's a few of you who are becoming digital separatists? The twitter thing feels like a pretty exclusive clique – I can't see myself bothering unless a couple of dozen of my friends are also on there four or five times a day, which I doubt they ever will be. The news twitters ("tweets"?) are too frequent and too brief to be useful. And an RSS reader on an iPhone makes it convenient to keep up wherever I am in any case. Twitter just seems a bit… hyperactive.

(Having positioned myself as "mainstream" and Twitterers as dangerous extremists, I'm forced to remind myself that 90 per cent of my friends have no idea what RSS is.)