Well, just got another proof for the benefits of social media serendipity and being well-networked. Right after posting the TED talk by Evan Williams (co-founder of Twitter) on my Business Model Innovation blog (posted it there because I deemed it more relevant from an innovation management perspective than from an Enterprise collaboration perspective) I did see this tweet by Ross Mayfield of Socialtext and another one retweeting a comment by Clay Shirky to an observation and warning Ross just posted. Sounds more complex than it is in fact. Quoting Ross comment on his very own post here is just that, a nice little addition to my BMID post on serendipity which will show up over there via Trackback, yes, I said it pays to be networked).

@replies were invented by users of twitter as a convention to address a tweet to someone. Then some 3rd party clients like Twhirl implemented them, and then Twitter did. They are valuable ways of stringing together Tweets into a conversation. When someone @replies your username on twitter, you see their message in your replies tab. The problem is that anyone or anything can do so, so you may have a ShamWow message in your face.

Now, I am not going to mourn the loss of Twitter (not on a day on which I have crossed the treshold of 1000 followers, yesyesyes). But balancing spam and keeping those very welcome serendipitious effects is what we need to achieve indeed. I for one am not willing to give up on Twitter, even when I know this situation too. And this reminds us how lucky we are in our nice little corporate settings, no wiki vandals, no spammers on the microblogs … yes, the good life.