CoTweet is going to have to stay far ahead of Twitter going forward – which is odd to say considering that they are built on Twitter. Twitter will continue to add features to their paid accounts – just watch. Same thing they are doing by copying Friendfeed. Just wait until they launch threaded discussions :)

I would disagree though in your thinking on which company is threatened by changes to service offerings. I agree that CoTweet could be undone by enhancements to Twitter, but for me their greatest contribution was the ability to provide effective triage for support/sales services, managing incoming flow and assigning it to multiple people responding under a unified account. This is currently well outside the planned Twitter direction, though I think is actually now being offered by HootSuite for free (yet another company with an incomplete business model). It’s also the piece most likely to be threatened by SalesForce integrating twitter into their client management, support and sales streams. In my experience, SalesForce has never been used that heavily as an internal dialogue and workflow piece in the way that Yammer has.

I also think that Yammer is in fact more susceptible to the list development features recently introduced in Twitter. If they were to enable the ability to only tweet within a list as a distribution system they would take a big part of what Yammer does. Personally, I prefer to just create a WordPress P2 site for staff/project discussions.

Thanks very much again. I really appreciate articles that make me think specifically about how things are changing and what impact they’re going to have on information management in the organizations I work/volunteer with.