Gartner predicts Twitter fall from grace

Twitter and other social software sites will soon hit the disillusionment stage of analyst firm Gartner's Hype Cycle, meaning they could still be some years away from wide-spread enterprise adoption, according to the latest version of the report.

The Hype Cycle Special Report for 2009 is the company’s largest to date, examining the maturity of 1,650 technologies on topics such as cloud computing, data-centre power, cooling technologies and virtualisation.

Gartner’s Hype Cycles are designed to be a way to track the human response to technologies over a set period of time, and therefore their adoption path.

After the disillusionment phase, Gartner believes there comes a period where technologies are found to offer more practical benefits and eventually become widely accepted into mainstream implementation.

“Microblogging, in general, and Twitter, in particular, have exploded in popularity during 2009 to the extent that the inevitable disillusionment around ‘channel pollution’ is beginning,” noted Gartner in the report.

“As microblogging becomes a standard feature in enterprise social software platforms, it is earning its place alongside other channels, such as e-mail, blogging and wikis, to enable new kinds of fast, witty, easy-to-assimilate exchanges."

Gartner said an increasing number of businesses are experimenting with social software in early production deployments but businesses are expressing disillusionment when moving from point tools to integrated suites because of the realisation that so much work must be done to deploy them.

New technologies grabbing the public’s excitement include cloud computing, e-books and internet TV, Gartner said.

“The levels of hype around cloud computing in the IT industry are deafening, with every vendor expounding its cloud strategy and variations, such as private cloud computing and hybrid approaches, compounding the hype,” the report noted.

On e-book readers, Gartner said that although Sony's e-book reader and Amazon's Kindle have attracted a great deal of attention during 2009, the devices still suffer from proprietary file formats and digital rights management technologies which will limit their adoption.

“Looking at real benefit, rather than the hyped expectations, we see a number of potentially transformational technologies that will hit the mainstream in less than five years, including Web 2.0, cloud computing, internet TV, virtual worlds and service-oriented architecture (SOA),” said Jackie Fenn, author of the report.

“Longer term, beyond the five-year horizon, RFID, 3-D printing, context-delivery architectures, mobile robots, and human augmentation will be transformational across a range of industries.”