CAD Twitter?

Millions of people, generally younger than me understand the potential of social networking sites. I, on the other hand, am just beginning to grasp the potential. I see how the tools are used, to communicate what you are doing now, and to tell people more about your interesting life. Andre McAfee (Harvard Business School) describes in his August 15 blog post The Twit's Progress how sites like twitter and facebook  fill in the gap between physical meetings.  Professor McAfee goes on to suggests that these sites have enterprise application, which made me wonder how twitter, or twitter like tools could be applied to the design environment.

Is it possible to integrate twitter into our design work flows? And how relevant is a tool like twitter in an environment where we can reference, overlay the designs from other members on our design team? Can I get designers to use it?

Essentially, twitter lets us tell people what we're doing now and it allows us to raise points of interest. "Mark is having dinner" isn't really useful to the design team, but "Jason just made changes to front elevation" might be useful. I may not be paying attention to what Jason is doing, but if I get a message from him it may prompt me to check out the change. Jason may be more inclined to type the message if 1) it's short; 2) he doesn't have to find your email address, or 3) wait for you to accept a chat session. He just let's the network know, in this case the design team, that he is or has changed the file.

So, there seems to be some advantage to using a tool like this. Should we sign up for twitter and follow our design teammates, or can we implement our own tool to track what others are doing? With our own tool we could automate info exchange on certain actions; "Mark made changes to the second floor ductwork" could be a message sent automatically each time I make a change to that file. 

I like both ideas. The advantage of using twitter is that it's ready to go and it's free. Your design team just signs up and accepts each other's invitation to follow. The disadvantage is that anyone can see what you're working on, including your competition. Your own application would take care of this, but of course the disadvantage is that you have to build it, or at least pay for it.

What do you think? Do you think your design teams would increase collaboration if they used CAD Twitter?