Remember the days when most business communication was via the US Postal Service? That was true in just about all of America at the end of the 1970s. Then came messenger services, FedEx, fax machines, and the current but aging leader, email. Email started to lose ground when Instant Messaging crept into the workplace. Now twitter is looking for its time in the spotlight. Already there are a few services that claim to be the follow-on to twitter. When my Indianapolis small business computer outsourcing customers ask me about it, I still tell them that most of us are looking for a good way to use twitter in our businesses. I also tell them that someone surely will and we'll all be better off for it -- for a while.

This is the same advice we give to our IT support services customers about most new technology. Oftentimes its much easier to say whether it will benefit their operations or not, but those days may also have gone the way of the fax machine. The way in which we do business with one another changes rapidly any more. While there will always be a place for good old fashioned face-to-face meetings, much of the routine interaction between our computer support customers and their stakeholders is becoming automated. It's machines talking to machines with no human interaction. Even many of the computer services we provide have gone that way.

Perhaps Twitter will be the point where the pendulum starts to swing the other way. Maybe it will be as instantaneously connected as any of us care to get and we'll go back to slower, more intentional interactions with one another. Yeah, I doubt it too.