Sharon Gaudin’s write-up in Computerworld summed up some of Twitter’s fundmental engagement problems:

The number of Twitter users has climbed to a lofty 75 million, but the growth rate of new users is slowing and a lot of current Twitterers are inactive, according to a study released today.

…the study shows that a lot of Twitter accounts aren’t active, and the number of accounts that sent even one tweet in a given month hit an all-time low in December.

According to the findings, only 17% of all Twitter accounts Twittered last month. That’s down from more than 70% in early 2007 when Twitter was a fledgling company with far, far fewer users.

Early on, I thought Twitter would be like any other technological innovation: People who are more tech-inclined and early adopter in nature will embrace the technology first, and then it becomes more broadly accepted later after certain modifications occur.

But I think Twitter has passed that inflection point by now.

And if it is broadly accepted as a technology, it’s in the form of modifications made to Facebook, not Twitter itself. I also think enterprise microblogging will be more broadly applicable to the masses than Twitter ever will as a technology.

There could be myriad reasons why Twitter can’t capture people’s attention outside what’s becoming a very specific audience. One could be its structure: The Facebook stream allows you to view pictures, videos and other bits of dynamic content without having to click on a link to redirect you elsewhere. Twitter, by contrast, is all about links and redirection, which takes more time than many (and the numbers seem to support this) are willing to give.

Twitter is morphing into a social bookmarking service. While there are still some incredible tweets that I read everyday absent of links, that’s starting to happen less and less.

It’s a shame. I wish more people I interacted with in my daily life (especially outside work) were on Twitter. But I’m becoming more and more skeptical if that’ll ever happen.

Now, Twitter does deserve credit in combating its mainstream stream (ha) problem lately. It created better out-of-box, or in the browser, experience for new users with Lists and automatic ReTweets. These types of features might seem like a next logical step — or even pedestrian — to power users, but for new users who have no idea what a TweetDeck or a Seesmic is, it really helps. Still, even with Twitter’s openness in exposing its APIs and allowing people to build on the platform, the more closed Facebook has continued to thrive because it marries microblogging (or status messages, which are longer and have threaded comments) with other social sharing features in one constant stream without the need for redirection.

For this reason, I believe microblogging, integrated with other social software, will be more useful for the general populace as a technology at work than it ever will in their consumer life. Here is why enterprise microblogging will affect more people, and their day-to-day, than Twitter:

1) You Know the People

One of Twitter’s main problems is that if you reside outside of the insular community I mentioned above, it’s hard to see why you should be on Twitter. Suppose you’re an accountant, a doctor, or an auditor — rather than a social media consultant, digital or SEO marketer, or John Mayer. When you let Twitter cull your e-mail address book, you won’t come up with many names of people you know that are already on the service. So you need to start following people you don’t know. While seasoned Twitter users know value can be derived from following people you don’t know, most people won’t get there (60 percent leave after the first month), or their accounts go static and unused.

At work, you know the people on the enterprise microblogging platform because you work with them. If you have internal social networking profiles, when you examine one of their enterprise tweets, you can click on their name and see information with much greater depth than you ever could on a Twitter profile. When you know people, you’re more likely to understand the content and context of their short messages.

2) Communication Problem is More Real at Work

People already have consumer e-mail and Facebook (which has a status update) to communicate with their friends (not to mention phone, IM and texting). So it’s no wonder that many people can’t be bothered to spend much time on Twitter. Flawed as they are, those other technologies are good enough for them as consumers because they know exactly who they want to communicate with and how to reach them. In addition, services like Gmail sort through SPAM and enable accurate searches, so the “e-mail is broken” proposition doesn’t hold.

At work, the opposite is true. For most of you, your IT department has provided you with work e-mail that isn’t as nice as Gmail. Plus, you have to deal with occupational spam. When a colleague encounters a quandary that traditional systems and processes can’t readily address, he pings you and several other people. Odds are, only one or two of you possesses the right information to help him address his business problem, but he has already interrupted everyone else who doesn’t.

With enterprise microblogging, you can ask questions openly in the stream. The people who don’t have the answers can let it pass by without hitting a “reply-all,” and the person who does know can respond transparently for everyone to see (in case they ever encounter the same problem). This information remains searchable for everyone. This would not happen as efficiently in e-mail or IM.

3) Privacy Provides Comfort to Share

Twitter is sometimes too public for its own good (I’m discounting the fact they have the “private” option, since so few use it). Everything you publish flows into the stream for anyone (now, including Google) to see, and that’s scary to people. This could explain why Twitter is turning into a social bookmarking service. Tweeting a link and a one sentence explanation of how you feel about it seems safe enough. Tweeting where you’re headed for dinner or where you take your kids to soccer is too intimate and private for the whole world to know (again, we’re talking the everyman’s use case, who, believe it or not, aren’t enthralled with an overshare culture). As a result, they have more comfort with the Facebook status message.

Inside businesses, enterprise microblogging provides great privacy that eases people’s minds, lowering the threshold for sharing. A sales rep knows that he can enterprise tweet his location without worrying whether or not a competitor might put two and two together. A CEO can enterprise tweet a link that only his employees should read, but doesn’t want the whole world knowing their reading. Also, status messages, which can be a great way to get started with microblogging, aren’t frowned upon like the “heading to lunch” tweets are on Twitter. They aren’t trivial in the enterprise; location and activity status have value.

4) Value Becomes Evident Faster

It’s unfortunate that many people don’t realize how great Twitter is due to the time it takes them to realize value. For the first month I was on Twitter, I didn’t know who to follow or what to tweet. I figured it out eventually, and now enjoy amazing value from it. But for the general web populace, the gratification has to happen faster, or they leave. (I was also aided by the fact that I work within the proxy of the types of folks who typify Twitter’s user base, and I’ve come to know many of them personally.)

At companies, enterprise microblogging can provide immediate value because of the aforementioned points (knowing the people, and privacy). It’s less complicated to understand than most kinds of enterprise software, and people from all areas of your organization can get started with minimal training. Take this CIO story that highlights St. Louis Public Radio (SLPR), which recently implemented enterprise microblogging:

For example, SLPR’s receptionist received a call from a listener who heard an announcement on the radio about an event at a local high school and wanted to know more about it. Instead of sending an e-mail blast to all staff members, the receptionist used Socialtext’s app to poll the staff, and received an answer in less than five minutes. There was an immediate response, and we didn’t have to clutter e-mail inboxes to get it, Eby says.

[Abrupt end to post/cgl]

But the Real-Time Web Masters of the Universe are trying to reform our tabular nature. First, it occurred with widgets, information boxes and customized homepages. Suddenly, we could create nice window panes with helpful information that kept you in one place longer. If you found something interesting or urgent enough, you could click on it to launch a tangential tab and address it.

Then, Facebook and Twitter did something crazy: It combined disparate people and information — things that typically demanded their own tabs — and poured it all over us in one fluid current. It cut down the number of tabs because you can consume, publish and “like” information all in one area. Those companies’ ecosystems have flourished to customize the experience with filters, allowing people to cut huge steaks of information into manageable bites. Other start-ups, like Threadsy, are following suit.

The Web’s new aversion to tabs — coupled with a general lack of bandwidth to handle our real-time activities — has been so severe that it’s migrated us from the cloudy browser back down to the dusty desktop. The prevalence of Adobe AIR apps, which now many can’t imagine living without, signal an ironic twist for an industry once obsessed with the idea that everything should be in a browser.

But as we combine all the capabilities these tools provide us, we must do so carefully; we must be mindful of our innately tabular nature and past mistakes driven by tech companies’ insatiable thirst to be the all-in-one gatekeeper. As people, the idea of having information flow to us in one spot sounds appealing. But sometimes, we might just prefer to separate it, even as we’re consciously aware that it takes more time. Finding the golden mean between flow and tabs will be essential for the future of the Web, to keep it a place that complements, rather than disrupts, our lives.

The Difference Between Tabs, Networks and Flows

Tabs are not networks; they are a thing that walls off action. It’s easy to confuse tabs with networks because certain actions frequently get executed between you and the same set of people. Flows, on the other hand, radically combine the actions of your tabs and your networks (people) that operate within them.

Contrary to what some believe, the emergence of flow-based information streams wasn’t enabled by a social revolution to undermine hierarchy. It was an evolution based on the untenable nature of our tabular lives. Toggling has become too difficult. At 11 a.m., I have a meeting with my boss. At noon, I have to drive my friend to the airport. At 1 p.m., I have a meeting with a customer. Addressing this back-and-forth isn’t just a matter of calendaring; it should be a matter of managing flow. Unfortunately, most people still tab-toggle between phone lines, e-mail accounts, social networks, or calendars to interact with the people and information they need to achieve each of these tasks. Each toggle doesn’t seem like a lot of time or effort on its own, but taken in total, it adds up.

The results from this approach are plain to see: You’re late for the meeting, you miss the plane, or you’re not home in time for dinner.

Flow can address this problem by helping you pull the people and information you need to address each of those actions to the best of your ability, as quickly and efficiently as possible. That said, we shouldn’t overlook how challenging this will be for most people who live tabular lives. As much as I respect Clay Shirky’s notion that filter failures are a bigger problem than information overload itself, I don’t buy it entirely.

Even in an ideal world where we enjoy better filters, we will still suffer from both information overload and (due to the prevalence of social networks) people overload. At a certain point, people might prefer a full-blown visual or physical separation — much like they were accustomed to with tabs — instead of a filter.

Why Tabs Are Still Valuable

Despite the time sink they can create, tabs and tabular actions encourage innovation. We would be wrong to replace tabs with flow entirely. If success is only measured by how something fits into a massive flow aggregation, we could miss out on some great ideas. And open standards and APIs can only help so much to prevent this problem, too. In fact, the idea that open standards might save us is a pipe dream. As Tim O’Reilly pointed out this week, the Web’s power players will hinder such an effort for competitive reasons. Consequently, the decision to keep some aspects of our tabular life might be a commercial reality as much as it is a remnant of the way in which we compartmentalize people and information in the real-world.

Flows represent a tremendous opportunity for us to respond faster to change and better understand the world around us, but we should always make time to go into a tab every once and awhile to try something new.

In a week’s time, I find it more useful for my day-to-day than I ever did FriendFeed, a social networking reader and sharing service that most people never heard of until Facebook paid $50 million to buy it.

Threadsy is closer to what Google Wave should have been. Wave is often referred to as adhering to an “e-mail metaphor,” but that references its design, since Gmail and e-mail in general are absent from the product (a huge strategic mistake). Threadsy actually embraces e-mail as a central part of the product, showing a much more pragmatic approach to mixing these social technologies with more traditional tools people still use (e-mail and IM).

Some upsides I found in first week:

1. Mixing Twitter mentions with my Gmails. A mention of me on Twitter is a very specific action, much like an e-mail message addressed to me. Makes sense to have them in one spot.
2. Integration with Gchat. I grew up with IM, and I love it. So there. And unlike Wave, I don’t want my IMs edited like a wiki.
3. Easy ability to reply to a Gmail. Threadsy has a much more lightweight text editor than in regular Gmail, but I don’t need anything fancy for 90 percent of my e-mails.
4. Retweet function and the ability to write tweets and Facebook status messages. (Simple, and in a million other products, but nice)
5. Profiles for all your social stuff. Threadsy will automatically go through your e-mail, Twitter and Facebook and build profiles for your friends that show all the social networks they belong to and links to their presence on that particular site.

What I didn’t like/needs work:

1. You can’t reply to a Facebook private message without launching a new page/tab in Facebook. I’m sure this isn’t Threadsy’s fault — more that Facebook wants you to use their horribly designed private message system.
2. On the right sidebar that shows tweets and Facebook status messages, it’s noisy. Need a way to do specific lists like I would in Twitter itself now or groups in TweetDeck (though maybe Threadsy shouldn’t bother with this, which I’ll get to in a moment).
3. With Facebook updates, it doesn’t respect the fact I’ve “removed” certain people from my stream. One of the best features Facebook added was the ability to opt out of someone’s updates. It allows you to avoid defriending someone, but keep them out of your way. Unfortunately, their updates still flow into Threadsy.
4. Rich media integration needs work. I viewed a YouTube video within a Gmail in Threadsy, and it stretched awkwardly across the screen for a pretty lousy viewing experience.

As Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) pointed out in September, the type of thing Threadsy and other such start-ups are trying to do could become a billion dollar industry, but that’s only if people can be convinced they need such a service in their daily lives. I think the key to mainstream use will be pushing Facebook and Gmail features harder in the product than Twitter. Joe Web User spends more of his day in Facebook and Gmail. Fact. Moreover, Twitter’s power users would turn to Seesmic, TweetDeck and other such apps for their Twitter needs anyway. Threadsy is a more lightweight use case for Twitter, and I think it could be advantageous for its future to keep it that way.

/cgl

UPDATE: Want to get started on Threadsy? After reading my post, the Threadsy CEO asked me to share this link with my readers to help you get started.