Twitter in-depth
This is a continuation of my earlier post on Twitter, and hopefully (one of) my last. People frequently ask me what Twitter is all about and why someone would want to use it, so here is my answer for them.
What is Twitter?
Twitter started as a microblogging concept, a personal blog where your entries have to be 140 characters or less. While some people certainly still use it as thus, it appears to have evolved into something else. I see Twitter now as a hybrid between IM and email with a little IRC thrown in for good measure. My guess is this comes from the push nature of twitter, where bogging is generally pull: you send emails and IMs, but you visit blogs or pull in RSS feeds. Now that it is being used as a communication platform, it feels like a worldwide chat room where instead of having to mute people you don't want to hear, you unmute people you do want to hear.
Why would you want to use Twitter?
I'm frequently impressed with how the publicity of Twitter as a communication platform exposes its best features. You can watch stock tips being exchanged, you can get trickle-down publicity from the power users by engaging them in conversation. I only wish I had started using it more seriously when I first created the account. I can attribute multiple signups at MarketOutsider.com to my use of Twitter. If nothing else, whenever I'm downtown, I can usually find some people to grab lunch with me via Twitter.
You do still have to monitor your own quality of service with Twitter. Some users follow as many people as they can, which in my mind is crazy, as you would just inundate yourself with noise. I follow about 70 people, which is about all I can handle. Luckily many of them only say 1 or 2 things a day. I'm told if you have too many followers, it can also be burdensome; every time you say something you get hundreds of replies.
Power users
The users that get the most out of twitter are its elite power users. These are people like @JasonCalacanis who have tens of thousands of followers. These users serve as a sounding board, a set of free labor, a market test group, or any other of a myriad of uses. A few weeks ago Jason asked for comments on a design mock-up for Mahalo, and he got over 500 comments within a couple hours, for FREE. When @therealdvorak couldn't find something on google, he asked his followers and instantly got five messages with exactly what he was looking for, again, for FREE. The ones who are using it well are pulling off the ultimate in marketing, perfectly targeted $0 CPM advertising.
Corporate use
It might be interesting for a large corporation to use an internal version of Twitter to help relay ideas. It's publicity would help keep things open, and encourage others with input or related tasks to be informed where email wouldn't. I wouldn't want to be the first one to accidentally send a message to the public Twitter that was intended for the corporate one, though.
Bots
Twitter's API has made for some interesting bots. @StockTweets follows stock traders on Twitter who share their watchlists and trades. @lotd is a club for people to share song lyrics. @winetweets is a bot that shares people's wine reviews. My feeling is the best twitter bots are still to come.
Summize
The public nature of twitter makes for some interesting analysis. You can use Summize to watch a search term as it happens in Twitter, or get the sentiment expressed by twitter users for a particular subject. Any time you can watch the thoughts and activities of a large group of people in real-time, you can get some interesting network effects.
What is the future of twitter?
I have a feeling that if the concept that makes twitter so viable really starts making it to the mainstream, the concept will have to leave the confines of Twitter's servers. Whether this is in the form of an open standard like email, or an open-source replacement, or what, a single company--especially with Twitter's technical problems--can't and probably shouldn't own a communication platform.
Revenue stream?
Twitter can't operate without income forever, so they will need to find a revenue stream.
There is a potential for an Ad-based revenue model, given users are providing them with information that could be used for targeting, maybe with a potential for mobile location-based advertising to those using twitter over SMS.
They could also consider a freemium model, where those users with high numbers of followers, maybe >10,000 pay a fee. These users will probably be fine with that, as they are the ones who can most easily get value out of Twitter, as described above.
The last option I've considered is having a corporate version that they license for companies to set up their own private Twitter networks. I'm not sure this would really make sense with the whole Twitter concept, but it has potential.
