Mike posted something interesting about the evolution of the ‘Out-Of-Office’ Message or OOF as we call it at Microsoft. Email meets Twitter so to say.
I was e-mailing a vendor contact as part of a document review process and received this “out of office” message. I think it’s perfect. I’ve cleaned it up a bit below but I think this is a sign of things to come – don’t push away, simply redirect:
I’m at the <insert name of event or business trip> between <dates> and will have delayed access to e-mail. If you have an extremely urgent issue, then call me directly at <cell phone info>.
If you want to keep track of me, then follow me via Twitter at http://twitter.com/<name> or via FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/<name>.
Out-of-office replaced by shared situational awareness.
Source: The New Out-Of-Office Message: Twitter and FriendFeed
I really see this as a good example on how ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘Enterprise 2.0’ go hand in hand. Surely not every organisation will approve of the use of for example Twitter and not every employee ‘Tweets’.
It’s solutions like Twitter that lay the foundation of a new breed of social and contextual awareness solutions that we will integrate in our Enterprise platforms …
I still find it easier to follow someone through his/her weblog than via Twitter (so I pity that you don’t mention weblogs as a possible medium). But the more this person wil use Twitter instead of his/her weblog the more you’ll have to use Twitter as well. The best example I think is the way Robert Scoble uses these media…
Willem,
I agree with you; there are multiple options to “keep track” of peoples whereabouts.
The challenge however is that every individual has a choice which tools to use. Ofcourse within a company you would want to provide some guidance, but you can not force people to use a certain method. “Forcing” everybody to blog will not work simply because not everyone is a blogger and willing / able to maintain consistency.
So the bottom line for me is how do you enable a platform which allows multiple “people tracking” capabilities to be combined …