Have any of your end users asked you about using microblogging services such as Twitter, Yammer, SocialTextSignals, Socialcast or Present.ly?

If not then you should consider yourself one step ahead of your end users. We’ve all been hearing about Twitter especially during President Obama’s recent address to Congress back in February. And if you follow Twitter at all then you’ve probably heard about the “Cisco Fatty” story of the young twitterer who tweeted that she would hate her work at a job that was recently offered to her by Cisco.

These microblogging services offer a way to send messages via a real-time short messaging service that works over multiple networks and devices. On Twitter, the messages must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the web.

Earlier last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt had this to say about the microblogging service Twitter:

“Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as a sort of poor man’s email systems. In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don’t have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?”

The way I see it is that the microblogging services have a couple of different evolution paths: they can choose not to compete with email and instead grow as a “complementary” service to email, they can compete and offer the same services as email (To, From, Bcc, Subject, Reply, Attachments, Formats, etc) or they can evolve along their own terms and let other companies provide the bridges and gateways from microblogging services to traditional email.

I know that in my day to day operations it’s not unusual for me to be on a conference call,  on a speaker phone, and be sending emails while answering instant messages from others who need a quick one or two word answer to a question such as “are you available to talk right now?”

The difference between IM and microblogging is that microblogging is more of a one to many medium whereas IM is mainly used for one to one though it is possible to include others in the communications. Email can be either.

I think email admins should start planning how they will eventually manage and secure future versions of their corporate email systems that are capable of real-time microblogging services.