Widgets are cool, but twitter in a Notes client can be useful too

Apologies to Pink Floyd but...
"You twitter and waste the hours in an offhand way"

Well you can and is that a good thing or bad from your IT department's perspective?

I was on the phone today with someone at CIO magazine and he was writing an article about Facebook from an IT perspective. Should have discussed Twitter instead, Chris if you read this, call me, I have your next article.

While I do not see Twitter as useful to me in my daily life, one person, Luis Suarez of IBM Spain is using it now almost exclusively and shuns his email. An interesting thought.

At Lotusphere many of us, including myself, used Twitter non-stop, nameless Lotii twittering at 3 or 4 am even. Now at a conferene like that it was very useful because, there was no way to sametime anyone...yet(read future posts on this topic). Well Lotus 911 did get Bleedyellow to handle Sametime for all of us, but it was mostly afterwards we all joined.

So with nothing from Lotusphere itself, we could rely on Twitter. And it was great especially during the opening sessiosn when we all probably killed the Twitter servers tryingt o be first or last with a comment.

Anyway, so now it's a gadget in my 801 Notes client and it is enjoyable to read an occasional missive from Luis or Chris Miller of IDONOtes fame or Bruce "Ideajam" Elgort among many others.

But as I received an email which would interest Luis I could twitter him directly and send him the information. Yes I could IM him as well(I need your IM Luis) but since he was just sitting there this worked out well.

The bottom line is, I never had to leave my Notes client for anything, browser pages are embedded in it, Sametime is as well and now Twitter, Linkedin, the Symphony suite and more.

Thanks Mary Beth for adding this benefit for everyone. And thanks to the Turtle Partnership for hosting an open Widget catalog for everyone as well!