To this point, I have avoided getting into the conversations weighing the value and future of Twitter, FriendFeed, and the latest generation of community communications services. They clearly represent an evolution of instant messaging and the triumph of the feed.
Twitter is an early adopter service (see Kara Swisher's post) and hasn't yet caught on with mainstream Web users. The Twitter population is a rounding error compared with Web mail or Yahoo Messenger, AIM, MSN Messenger.
But Twitter adds a new dimension to instant messaging beyond its SMS-like 140-character constraint with the concepts of following and followers, enabling a kind of broadcast model.
In July 2007, Dave Winer described Twitter as "a network of users, with one kind of relationship: following." He also called it a micro-blogging system with a "relatively open identity system."
Steve Gillmor describes Twitter as creating a social graph of who you follow that intersects with the social graph of who follows you.
"The asynchronous nature of follows creates both a star system and an equal opportunity for anyone to get involved," Gillmor said. "You can build your own sphere of influence. You can create a microcommunity that links up with other microcommunities that forms an expanding circle of influence. If I say something and Scoble replies, his complete orbit doesn't follow but they see we are talking [Tweeting], so I get a bunch more follows. The net result is my sphere is increased by the addition of more strong followers." The APIs have made Twitter more extensible and viral, such as flowing Twitter into Facebook status pages or FriendFeed.
Winer just posted some data, taking into account the number of followers and number of posts, and coming up with an indicator of what he dubbed the amount of noise or "spew" issued by a person using the Twitter transport.
It's not exactly a measure of influence (more an indicator of overall reach), but it can be a huge number. In Winer's calculation, Robert Scoble has the most followers on Twitter, with 21,310, and 10,713 Tweets, which multiplied together yields 228,294,030 potential impressions. (It would be less given the ramp up in followers and Tweets but still a big number.)
In this context, Twitter is a highly efficient way to share, discover, and market ideas. My journalist/blogger friends have taken to Twitter broadcasts of their posts, and on occasion I have Twittered live events, broadcasting my notes and observations to followers, who receive it in real time or for later consumption. You can also "Track" keywords to follow people or concepts without signing up to follow them. "It creates a public/private scenario where discoverability and special social interactions can happen," Gillmor said.
Where is Twitter heading? First it has to get a more stable infrastructure. The company is taking on additional funding of $15 million to $20 million which should help in the scaling up department. With the new funding, Twitter will likely start adding new features. The danger is in messing with the simplicity of the service, but it seems inevitable if you look at how instant-messaging applications evolved. Below is a look at where Twitter came from and where it might end up in the next year or so.
Jeff Clavier (an investor in Seesmic which recently acquired the Twitter app Twhirl) views Twitter as a "quick return on the attention investment":
This micro-chunking of the information - the arbitrary limitation to a few tens or hundreds of characters in a world of Gigabit networks - drops the time commitment barrier to a couple of minutes tops. Most people can't commit large chunks of time to read/write/comment on blogs, but everyone has a couple minutes to spare a few times a day... not too far away from a phone or a computer. Offering broad access on the web, on the phone, one message at a time or through applications, in real time (even if you are not pushing it like Scoble does) or in batch mode, allows time (and CPA ?) challenged users to get a quick return on the attention investment they choose to make at any point during the day.
Twitter adds to the overflow of information, but if you find the right people to follow, or lead, it does offer a good ROI for the time spent consuming 140 characters at a time.
Software pioneer Dave Winer knows about disruptive technology. He was instrumental in formulating RSS, XML-RPC, OPML, outliners, and podcasting.
Dave Winer
(Credit: Dan Farber)Here's part of what Dave had to say about Google's App Engine, a foray into making its infrastructure available to developers.
Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer. Now Google is taking the black magic out of operating a scalable web app. Python is the new BASIC.
Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb considers, as I did, Google's dominant position in selling ads online and how App Engine could amplify that dominance:
The point is, Google App Engine may be neither competitive nor monopolistic - it might just be trivial as Google Pages or Google Base. So far it seems pretty simple and useful, though. We'll have to take a deep breath, hope that Amazon and others step up their offerings a notch or two in response, and see what the future brings.
Clint Ecker of Ars Technica also notes a potential downside in Google's App Engine:
Perhaps the most blatant downside is being locked into Google's platform. Existing projects will have to be ported or written from scratch, and those that rely on traditional relational databases will probably have difficulty making the transition. Even more difficult would be transitioning your application to your own servers if you choose to leave Google's tender embrace. Once you've created an established application on top of Google's authentication service and stored all your data within the company's datastore, removing all this code and data and moving it to another location would appear to a be fairly onerous task.
It's still early in the platform-as-a-service sweepstakes. But the signs are clear. As Nick Carr pointed out in his book The Big Switch, the large clouds will cover the planet with computing infrastructure. Amazon has to be more motivated to improve its Elastic Compute Cloud, and big players like Sun, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others will also be inspired to open their clouds to developers. But as Dave pointed out, we are in the BASIC, embryonic days of platforms-as-a-service.
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