I was looking at the evolution of content-based communication and found the association between micro-blogging and micro-content interesting. The idea I’d like to raise is the possible evolution of micro-blogs and micro-content services as communication between people during the product lifecycle process. The most popular way that people communicate today is messaging. Messaging in various forms – emails, messages connected to processes, and instant messaging is a dominant way of communication for people in manufacturing organizations irrespective of their sizes. But it remains the most inefficient way of corporate communication. Overflowing mail boxes, disconnected processes etc. definitely require improvement.
A micro-blog is a way to communicate via a short text of multimedia messages between a registered group of people. Micro-blogs provide a way of communicating a short commentary to communicate between people for different purposes. By Connecting to micro-blogs micro-content has emerged. Micro-content can be defined as content available via single available URL. Successful adoption of consumer-oriented micro-blogs such as Twitter (what are doing?) service has raised the question about the possible usage of micro-blogs and related content technologies for business.
Possible scenarios of usage for product design and manufacturing can include cross-functional team notification for groups of designers, product promotion via sales and marketing channel communications, maintenance operation notification, and others. That being said, the availability of PLM micro-content in lightweight compatible design formats, aggregated content and combination of various product related information at a single point of access (micro-content URL) can optimize communication among people.
