The future of Twitter

O’Reilly’s Ben Lorica says that it will be similar to the explosion of popularity in blogging.

When Microblogging Grows Up

FriendFeed for live-blogging

WWDC attendee MG Siegler is saying that FriendFeed is the best way to blog live events.

I created the room last night and started posting some questions such as, “What do you think is the more important feature, 3G or GPS?” The room filled up rather quickly with both FriendFeed power users and bystanders alike. By the time Steve Jobs’ keynote kicked off today at 10 am, we had over 500 members in the room interacting with us. (Remember, that is just members who joined to interact with us. It’s like a giant chat room minus all the nonsense usually associated with chat room.)

And that is really the key here, the interaction. Unlike if we were to do a constantly updated live blog post where users would have to do the usual routine of posting comments, which is both relatively slow and are unlikely to get answered, FriendFeed allowed us to have a conversation with those who weren’t at the event.

I haven’t had a chance to use FF’s new rooms feature, but it seems like it is a great addition to the service. However, I wonder how long the service can be “like a giant chat room minus all the nonsense.” Presumably, the nonsense is kept at a minimum by the fact that the number of obnoxious users is low. As the number goes up (it should correlate with the site becoming more popular), the nonsense level is likely to rise. This will lead us right back to a blog-type situation, where it is necessary to moderate comments, thus keeping them from appearing in a timely manner.

via Steve Rubel

Twitter business model: Selling interactions

Twitter, the ubiquitous microblogging platform, has investors worried because, despite its popularity as a life-streaming application, it isn’t clear how the service can make money. Although the company is experimenting with ads in Japan, there is some concern that U.S. users would reject ads on the site.

Another possibility, though, is the use of Twitter as a marketing platform. SMS Text News recently reported on an interesting use of Twitter by a marketer at Boingo:

Pat Phelan is bored out of his skull waiting for his flight at the fancy new Heathrow Terminal 5. How do I know? He Twittered this. Well, an enterprising person at Boingo Wireless (also using Twitter) decided to use his/her initiative and make Pat an offer of a free wifi pass:

Best ever use of Twitter for business @boingo saw that I was delayed in Heathrow and offered me a free wifi logon, really cool

Why isn’t facilitating these kinds of interactions Twitter’s business model? Since users like this sort of thing, Twitter wouldn’t take any kind of hit from them, and I’m sure marketers and customer service workers would be thrilled to have an easy way of connecting with customers who are in a jam. Twitter could could then take a small percentage of resulting transactions, or just a few pennies as a “finder’s fee,” similar to the eBay model.

Chronicle.com on Twitter

Jason Jones at The Salt Box has posted a link to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s recent story on academic uses of Twitter (sequestered behind paywall, or free for a limited time).

Most of the article repeats basic claims about new communication technologies—a lot of Tweets are mundane, some are profound, be careful what you post. There is some good stuff on one of the most interesting uses of Twitter: a broadcast-messaging system for emergency announcements. Overall, it’s a good summary of how the technology is being used by some academics, along with the benefits and possible drawbacks of integrating microblogging into academic or pedagogical pursuits.

Video-microblogging with Seesmic

Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web claims that video-microblogging service Seesmic is more than just Twitter with video.

There appear to be two primary factors behind the early enthusiasm for Seesmic. The first is that it’s very well executed. Le Meur is the former head of SixApart Europe, the company hired Ben Metcalfe as an early consultant and there must be a number of other very social-media savvy people there whom I haven't met yet. The company takes feature requests via a public video thread. They hired at least one very skilled Flash designer. Usability is fairly high, it’s very easy to record a video on Seesmic and there’s literally zero turn-around time before your video is available in the public timeline and as a reply if appropriate. Can the company continue to scale? That will be a big question.

Aside from that, there’s something about a video-only environment that yields a level of personal accountability and quality discourse that you don’t find on other services. It’s a small, yet global, and very welcoming community. Many entrepreneurs claim that their community of users are the key to their momentum—but at Seesmic you can see the faces and hear the voices that prove it.

I’m not sure that these factors are so different as to make the description “Twitter with video” inaccurate, but Seesmic sounds like an interesting service. As more people’s cellphones are able to record and transmit video, this service (or services like it) are going to be increasingly popular. However, if the site wants to truly lock up the market, I don’t see why it wouldn’t include text messaging as well. (And I may be wrong about this: it seems that Seesmic is video only, but maybe it isn’t.)

Tweetmeme tracks the tweetosphere

Tweetmeme is a new service for tracking the movement of memes through the tweetosphere.

Tweetmeme looks for new content and tracks who else is talking about it. It ranks the content based upon who and how much a particular item is being discussed. As anyone knows, the number of URLs which spread virally through Twitter each day must run into the millions, so tracking where that viral trail starts and gains momentum is going to be fascinating. It also categorizes the content into blogs / videos / images and audio. Sure there are other Twitter aggregators like Politweets (politics), TweeterBoard (conversation analytics) and many others. But Tweetmeme has a few other features including a ‘river’ of new content and RSS feeds for the river (or categorized feeds for blogs / videos / images / audio).

I’m excited about this service; I’ve become interested in the kind of writing that occurs on microblogging platforms like Twitter, but I haven’t been able to do much research on the subject because I haven’t been able to find a way to archive tweets for research. It seems like Tweetmeme will make that possible.

via TechCrunch

Personal publishing and micro-fiction

Cameron Reilly of The Podcast Network has created a new site, Twittories, for crowdsourced stories composed in Twitter (via TechCrunch).

My wife and I were putting our kids to bed and we were doing something we have done with them since they were about two years of age. One of us starts a new story by telling a few lines and then the next person picks up where they left off and so on. I thought “gee, this is like a Twitter conversation” and started to wonder what it would be like to have a bunch of folks on twitter collaborate on a short story—140 characters at a time.

Apparently, a similar phenomenon has already demonstrated that it has legs: in Japan, novels are currently written and consumed on cellphones.



In a related post on Read/Write Web, Alex Iskold responds to a post by Fred Wilson on microblogging (Wilson drew the graph above), expanding on Wilson’s claim that microblogging fits a niche in personal publishing not met by chat, social networking, or blogging. Iskold concludes his piece this way:

The personal publishing market evolved from cumbersome web sites to online diaries called blogs to social networks and more recently to microblogs. Each form of personal publishing is different and each has its niche and audience. While social networks have been the most wide spread, the content creation there feels different from publishing. Because traditional blogging platforms are powerful and still require technical know-how, microblogging has evolved as an intermediate form of self-publishing. Microblogging has a shot of spreading blogging further into the mainstream as well as swaying some professional bloggers to start personal blogs.

Although Iskold doesn’t mention micro-fiction like Twittories in his post, it will be interesting to see how this kind of writing fits into the microblogging niche.

The New York Times on microblogging, GPS, and privacy

Two new pieces in The New York Times by Ivar Ekman and Laura M. Holson discuss the looming possibility of our cellphones being used to track our every move. In the first, Ekman reports how Google’s recent purchase of Jaiku could set up the search giant to acquire vast amounts of information about users. Here’s a quote from the article describing what Jaiku does:

Petteri Koponen, one of the two founders of Jaiku, described the service as a “holistic view of a person’s life,” rather than just short posts. “We extract a lot of information automatically, especially from mobile phones,” Mr. Koponen said from Mountain View, Calif., where the company is being integrated into Google. “This kind of information paints a picture of what a person is thinking or doing.”

Ekman points out that it is this automation—and its connection to “what a person is thinking or doing”—in the hands of Google that worries some people.

In the second article, Holson describes one instantiation of this mobile data-collection: GPS tracking with cellphones. A number of cellphone carriers now offer a service where their subscribers can show their location to other users and see those users’ locations as well. Typically, the services allow users to add and block other individuals from seeing their location on a person-by-person basis. Holson points out that the ethics of this practice are only emerging slowly—there are some people who users wouldn’t want to know their location, like bosses or spouses, but others, like close friends, who users would never think of blocking from the service.