This is the first of what is hopefully going to be a long series of rapid publishing experiments. Posts thought, written and published within an hour or less. So you are entering a hard hat area. Things are a little rough here ;)
Twitter is destined to be a great company, very soon. So obviously, in this post, I attempt to think through what's next after Twitter.
What has Twitter done?
- Made conversation itself the content
- Created one way relationships
- Achieved a remarkable balance between fully synchronous and fully asynchronous communication
- Lowered barrier to entry for blogging. 140 characters requires much less thought!
- Has become the conversation platform thus enabling several applications to run on top of this data
What next?
A personal gripe with Twitter is that it doesn't enable discovery of conversations as much as I'd like. Think of the following scenarios. They are all about discovery of similar things, but through your Twitter feed.
- Chris sees a news article about a whale that has washed ashore. Chris wants to stay abreast of developments in this news item. He finds a "Tweet me with Updates" button on the news article. He clicks this. The author of the news article is then able to tweet on this account with updates on the news. Chris gets these updates on his Twitter feed. A few days later when the whale is all well, Chris is able to disconnect from the whale Twitter feed.
- Bob is viewing an album on Flickr. He like a particular photo of Mt. Rainier. Bob finds a "Tweet me similar pictures " button next to the picture. He clicks on this and is able to set the frequency of updates. Bob now starts getting regular updates on his Twitter feed with links to similar pictures. These pictures seem to magically come from all over the web. Not just Flickr, but SmugMug, Picasa Web etc.
- Tanya is reading a blog when she sees an advertisement for a laptop with a 20% off coupon. There is a "Tweet me similar deals" button next to it. After she clicks on it, she starts seeing deals coming to her in her Twitter feed regularly.
Next, think of the following scenarios. Here your Twitter feed becomes more of a radio station of sorts :)
- Tony wants to learn more about high def TVs. He is able to create a Tweet station with the keyword hdtv. The system now starts sending him tweets related to hdtv. He is able to thumbs up, thumbs down on these tweets to personalize the station. He is also able to choose from a number of personalized stations (personalized by other people).
- Ram wants to start a Tweet station. This is like a radio station, except you tweet instead of playing songs. Ram then solicits others to start broadcasting through his station. A small group forms who start tweeting on topic through the station. The group is also able to make decisions when a certain member is not playing nice and removes that person. Tweet stations have ownership, partnership and boards of directors can be created. Tweet stations are able to insert ads into their feeds as a way to monetize their feeds. Think of them as mini media companies.
Next, think of the following scenarios. These focus on being able to build media out of tweet streams.
- Ditch RT! Add ability to link to any given tweet. This link (a URL) takes the user to a page with the tweet and all related posts . Of course the owner of the tweet gets access to analytics information about the tweet. Number of user visits, number of retweets, number of spawned conversations etc. This is automatic media creation and naturally advertising follows. Allow corporate Twitter accounts to advertise their feeds on pages through contextual relevance.
- Now, make these links the currency of Twitter search. PageRank and other search algorithms can apply on top of this data to be able to extract the most pertinent information.
- Enable Wikipedia to pull in the most pertinent Tweets on any given page. This adds a real-time effect to the otherwise static pages. Extend this to pretty much anywhere in the static web. Add ability to pull in pertinent conversations to static web sites.
If you are interested in coding any of this with me, do ping!
Photo credit - http://www.flickr.com/photos/arjunpurky/2435896643/
