If Web companies were humans, Twitter would be the hot chick whom men of all ages tried to bon... bond with: young Facebook , middle-aged Google , and pepper-haired Apple .
What makes Twitter so irresistible? Because Twitter is the first-ever public social network. Twitter brings people together by exposing the smaller details of life that we don't necessarily talk about because we think they are unconsequential. It lowers the expectations.We can't really worry about saying something if it has no consequences.
I identify 6 components of Twitter's technology that made the concept of public networking possible.
- Updating Twitter's status is easy (unconsequential)
- Updating Twitter's status is fast (140 characters)
- Updating Twitter is possible on the go (SMS)
- Updating Twitter is social (followers+search)
- Twitter is live (as fast as the sound of a voice)
- You can tweet passively (automatic updates)
The real gold in the social networking space is to track users' identities and activities, online and offline, simply because that is what advertisers will pay for. Facebook holds your identity, but it has a major privacy issue that makes it hard for them to monetize its data. Google has your online activities, but only when you are using a Google product (most of which are accessed from a computer). Apple knows what you are doing while on the go, but because they are the hardware provider, they also face privacy issues. Twitter is the first social network that unveils what users are doing offline, voluntarily, whether from their computer or on the go.
Twitter has gold between its hands: it knows what people are doing and where (hem, sometimes), and anyone (hem, advertisers) can interact directly with users because users voluntarily engage in this public form of interaction.
Here is an example of Twitter's amazing reach:
I am on the way to the ball park and tweeting from my phone: 'On the way to the ballpark'. From that, Twitter knows my location (because sent from a mobile), and it also knows one very precise keyword about what I am doing: 'ballpark'. Semantically, I can divide 'ballpark' into a subset of keywords: baseball, sports, hotdog, beer, caps, sports gears.. Based on my location, a search of close-by businesses can be done, advertisers that fit my tweet's keywords can be sorted out, and ads from the highest bidders for my keywords can be sent to me as an @ message for example.
This is a big deal because local advertising dollars represent a big share of the advertising market, and so far no web technologies has been able to offer an efficient solution, despite the opportunity that 2.0 technologies are creating. No other social networks have been able to pull this off because they promised not to share users' personal info, which is why users agreed to use the service in the first place. Twitter doesn't have this problem, it is all public.
Twitter's problem is different: How do you turn an advertiser's intrusion into a useful information? The solution is to normalize the intrusion of location-based messages in your notifications. In other words, add a geo-targeted news service to its features. This way, a tweet from your local coffee shop won't seem so weird if you also get tweets from a stranger who reports an accident in your neighborhood.
Twitter's other problems are: Its users' geolocation intelligence is not... smart enough , at least when it comes to serving millions of geo-targeted ads. A lot of tweets are not geo-tagged. It's changing, but slowly. So Twitter goes talk to Google , who's developing a major geo-data center. Twitter's identity system is also a little weak, which is why finding a way to work with Facebook doesn't seem so stupid. I could bet that 99% of Twitter users also have a Facebook profile. However, since the two might have not found a way to work together, maybe Twitter could try to get users' info on their own through social links on users' profiles, which is merely a way for users to give away more info than a nickname and an email address.
Now Apple jumps in the Twitter madness. Those companies do not actually want to buy Twitter. They are actually all betting on one horse, and feeding it with people's attention. If you start tweeting, they all win: Twitter buys identities from Facebook, buys geo data from Google, and then it can serve one-to-one, geo-targeted, contextual (and expensive) advertising opportunities to local advertisers. They can also re-sell that data to mobile service providers like Apple who maybe wishes to serve ads to its users through its applications network.
Just an idea though...
