Twitter & BTM

Twitter is all the rage these days, so we're jumping on the bandwagon. You can follow our official line at twitter.com/edhorst_ap. We plan to use Twitter to update all those interested in getting the latest from AmberPoint.

Of course, we're still novices with Twitter. Others seem to have taken the medium quite a bit further. We're not surprised to see our competitors following our Twitter feed, but it is a bit alarming to see them practically stalking anyone's tweets that mention "AmberPoint". And we've seen a few proactively reach out to our existing and prospective customers with fictitious information (much like my observation in a recent post on shopping for a new car).

We can't tell how Twitter will evolve. Is it reasonable to stalk and spam users in Twitterland with unwanted messages and posts? Email provides spam filters -- what does Twitter offer?

At AmberPoint, we'd like to establish a policy to not abuse social chatter. If you wish to follow us, we'd love it. If you wish to interact with us, we'd be happy to respond. However, we plan to avoid spam-like "@joe buy amberpoint" sales pitches to the denizens of Twitter. Perhaps that might be good etiquette for Twitter to proliferate. Imagine being bombarded by salesmen from the another telephone company just because you happened to mention you were using Comcast!

A "Do-Not-Tweet" list, anyone?

Back to management topics. Twitter does remind us of the principles underlying Business Transaction Management. With BTM, you follow the trace of a transaction in real-time, as it flows across a distributed application environment. A transaction can update you on its status along the way, letting you know if there was a problem mid-flight. Of course, that remains the holy grail for BTM. Not all systems are built to provide updates. In fact, most don't. That’s where AmberPoint gets creative. Our technology generates these transaction tweets for you. All you need to do is to follow!