A Perspective on Entrepreneurship, Technology & Locative Dynamics

What is Twitter? Depending on your Internet affinity and your attitude towards new promising web services you may or may not have heard about it. Twitter is a micro blogging service that allows you to write mini blog posts up to a length of 140 characters. So it is very similar to an SMS but every post is publicly viewable unless you decide to protect your Twitter message feed. Why does it make sense to limit the number of characters if regular blogs posts or e-mails are not limited and thus should provide more flexibility and usefulness? That’s exactly the point with micro blogging, this artificial boundary changes and effects your style of communication. You have to try it on your own to experience this service and its provided value. On their website you can request to follow other Twitter users and you will see a list of persons following you.

Communication Patterns

Twitter messages can be informative “XYZ just happened”, entertaining “My cat just…” or totally useless “plus one #coffee”, to name some examples. It’s the same as for every other method of communication. It is not forced to be just informative or just about writing the most funny statement this day. Often you see posted questions from people looking for answers within their friend network. Everyone is listening to recommendations, reviews or general hints, so this is a highly valuable use case.

Writing direct private messages is allowed but it is common to use public replies to establish an open conversation, so everyone willing can follow it. That’s why you always see the @nickname syntax in your friend feed. This new openness makes Twitter very unique. The conversations are also a lot faster than regular blog entries and their comment system and thus the service has its right to exist next to all popular blogging platforms. It is just different.

You can try to use it as an replacement for an instant messenger or use it like a chat room but then the number of messages is getting to high and you will lose followers. Twitter is just an interesting mix of different communication tools.

Presence Feed

Twitter is an excellent service to publish information in a very frequent manner. You just need an Internet-connected mobile device and one out of several mobile Twitter clients and you can send information about your current location or your status whenever and wherever you want. This is a process that can be done within a minute and it is faster and easier than writing an e-mail. But you have to decide on your own if you want this openness in your life and what the advantages and disadvantages of this behavior are. A fully traceable life is not in every persons interest although it is getting more and more common.

Twitter is a location-based service in a sense that you can always mention your current location and anyone of your followers can react on this specific information and send you something that fits your context.

Network effects

Twitter was already founded in 2006 and grew steadily from this time on. It will reach the 1 million user base this year. The first time I tried it in June 2007. It did not convince me because no conversation took place and I did not know anyone. Luckily this situation changed and at one point you just recognize how many web worker around you are using it. Twitter relies on direct network effects and the more people use this application the more interesting it gets for everyone. At the LIFT conference dozens of attendees wrote Twitter messages during a talk so you could get immediate feedback of something going on at the same moment. It supported an active discussion and the sharing of ideas which can be very valuable. Of course this is not always wanted and necessary but in some scenarios this is a great method of interaction, e. g. interactive e-Learning.

Advice for beginners, if you don’t know any of your friends using Twitter look for people you know from you favorite blogs, podcasts or news sites. Twitterholic has a list of the most popular Twitter users, definitely a great starting point.

Productivity & Manageability

The risk and the fun with Twitter is that you can get addicted and that you spend many hours on reading these short messages and following its interesting links. There is the danger to become unproductive if it is too disrupting and thus you should avoid instantaneous alerts and notifications when using a Twitter desktop client.

Another problem, if the list of the people you are following becomes to large you cannot track it anymore because you will receive every minute a message and the noise is destroying the Twitter experience. Many people are already overstrained with their daily e-mails so hundreds of additional short messages are not in their interest. This is a general and not an application specific problem and you have to be your own regulator. Maybe just read the direct replies or the messages pointed to you and use Twitter search engines to figure out the latest hot topics.

One interesting question arising from these considerations: Is it enough to rely on Twitter or the Facebook news feed as your daily information source? Is it OK to ignore news sites because if something really important happens someone will mention it on one of these personal channels?

Openness & Mash-ups

Twitter provides a good APIs to remix its content and to access all the personal information and especially the messaging system. Thus it became one of the most popular applications for third-party developers to extend and evolve. It is a good example how openness can create a lot of publicity and attract many more users because of interesting third-party applications.

Maybe you are interested to use the Twitter hashtag syntax (#a_tag) in your messages. This allows services like #Hashtags to display realtime usage of tags in Twitter messages. Definitely interesting to recognize what is hot at the moment.

Strawpoll is asking one question a day and you can influence the result and vote via a Twitter message. Twittervision shows the latest messages on a map. Twitterbuzz figures out the most popular links sent. Maybe you should check out this list with 50 Twitter mash-ups.

I am synchronizing my Facebook status with my Twitter messages, although it is not ideal it is a good example of interconnected web applications and how open APIs allow interactions between them. Despite that there are dozens of Twitter clients for every major operating system and widgets you can integrate on your website.

Read more about Twitter and interesting mash-ups on their official blog. You can also check out my Twitter feed and try to
engage me into a debate…

Happy twittering everyone.

P.S.

Twitter is also used by companies as another marketing channel or for press or news announcements.

P.P.S.

Revenue model? Money follows the users and thus their goal is to increase the user base to become valuable as a company. Welcome to the Internet economy.