Microblogging is great but the way it’s articulated by Twitter provides a river of often random disconnected messages, most of which have little relevance to the things in which I am interested. Put another way content without context and purpose is meaningless and for business, that combination is crucial. That was the state of play when I first heard about eventtrack in November 2007, developed by Craig Cmehil, SAP’s developer network evangelist, buddy and fellow Irregular.
The idea behind eventtrack is very simple. Track and aggregate the messages around a particular event so that anyone following a specific (at the time hashtag) could get a sense of what was going on in a way that makes it easy to consume contextually relevant information. In other words, tracking people in the moment around an event.

Since those early days, eventtrack has grown, morphed and is now an indispensable part of my daily life. So when Oracle held OpenWorld this week, I created an event called #oow08, the main recommended tag, and tracked all the conversations, photos and videos posted using that tag. Eventtrack doesn’t capture everything because some people didn’t use that tag but I got enough to allow me a good sense of what was happening from my spot in the cheap seats.

Eventtrack is great for what it does, reflecting the needs of people like me who want to research, analyze and comment upon specific events of this kind. But it is dependent on a pool of interested people employing a specific tag. Fortunately, there are usually enough people around for me to get a solid amount of data around which I can form opinion. It comes down to the old adage: it’s not what I know but what I can see you know that matters.In that sense, eventtrack provides me with a ringside seat for events on the other side of the world.

Craig Cmehil. Image by cote via Flickr

What about results? As I write this, OpenWorld is coming to an end and the snapshot (see image above) tells me that there have been 1,773 messages, 662 images and 28 videos. Even if eventtrack misses 20-30% of what was ’said,’ I have more than enough information to digest. Parse that against people who matter to me who may not have used the #oow08 tag and I have as complete a picture as I need for my purposes. I also have the added benefit of discovering people I didn’t know but who are now important to me because of what they add to my store of knowledge. And of course, eventtrack data is publicly shareable.

Does eventtrack solve all my needs? No. As a researcher working in a loose network, it’s enough. What if I need to solve ‘real’ business problems? What if my question now becomes: ‘What are you struggling with?’ That’s where services like ESME come in and is the subject of part 2 of this discussion.

Dennis Howlett is a full time researcher, consultant and blogger on enterprise software whose primary outlets are at ZDNet. He is part of the ESME core team.

Ed. note: We’re honored to have this and future guest posts from Dennis because he’s been right at the core of enterprise microblogging discussions for a long time. As disclosed, he is affiliated with the ESME project. We’d like to make clear that others affiliated with related applications and projects are also welcome to guest post, and that such affiliations will always be disclosed.