Twitter has long had one of the greatest assets on the internet: knowing what information is hot right now. But while many companies pay to receive and search Twitter’s stream of tweets for such diverse uses as predicting the stock market and finding flu outbreaks, Twitter itself has never done much with it.
That is about to change.
With today’s purchase of Summify, and the long-lasting rumors that Twitter may purchase Flipboard from Twitter board member Mike McCue, Twitter is preparing a wholly new service for users: Finding and delivering information relevant to you in real time.
Twitter: Your Smart Assistant?
Both Summify and Flipboard use smart learning algorithms to produce collections of information personalized to you. And both have strong followings, proving that they’re onto something.
Twitter goal is likely nothing short of replacing some of the news and search resources you use now. For an example of other services besides Summify and Flipboard that Twitter may emulate to a degree think of a personalized version of Newser, LinkedInToday or NewsWhip. Or, as one report put it: “[This] Could Turn Twitter Into Your Newspaper.”
Twitter could potentially offer a personalized dashboard of information that you customize, perhaps even including email and texts to create a single page on the internet for most of your information needs. And even if Twitter doesn’t offer such a dashboard itself, they could expand their API to help other services be created that could do so.
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Twitter has the MSN bug (MSN liked to pull servers and delete them before contacting police, it helps protect their branding and coverup the fact they started a sex nightclub for 10 year olds without 1 bouncer). Twitter is nothing new – they push legal compliance onto others, and disregard the laws of their own country (not that there is any when your that wealthy). The media suck up to get on the good side and will continue to suck up long after it becomes a ghost town (myspace). As Twitter grows it will become just like the rest – usless, and filled crap that one commercial government produces to flood history books! Perhaps time to look for a non-site based solution to electronic border fences like SOPA (just to name 1 who are too busy ripping off peoples medical data). The mass media hype by the ever self important needing of protection wonders which the tiny Earth has now produced into the history books (aka 1%) will continue ever more until there is a time when its the 1% turns to die from a lack of everything (I die now to knowing you will eat your own childrens children if given half a chance).
You’re pointing out in part a very common phenomenon: as organizations get bigger and more powerful, over time they migrate in directions that increase their power or profit at the expense of others. All organizations go through this, in small degrees over time.
Hopefully the openness of the internet will assist users and the media in helping Twitter not to overdo changes that aren’t for the best of all involved.
Twitter is amazing… particularly as a global-to-local (& vice versa) communications platform for implementing strategy (my interest, as opposed to using Twitter in a more socialized vernacular. What I hope is that Twitter doesn’t fall victim to advances that reinforce ‘silos’, i.e., of a personal bias & reinforcing nature. Diversity in flexibility to connect – w/people on Earth – is exactly what makes YouTwitter, stand out-and-apart from ANY other media-medium!
Keep well, globally minded, and savvy smart!
-jw
Lake Climate Group
@jonaweiss
Twitter currently sells it’s “firehose” (stream of all tweets) and the use cases are incredibly widely diversified. I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitter makes it very customizable on the back end but very simple (and advertiser-friendly) on the front end.
Where is goes eventually is probably going to have a lot to do with how well it works out with their plan for letting advertisers run ads against it.
I expect that over a long period of time, as it becomes more popular with new users, the use cases that new users stick to will be where Twitter focuses their attention. But that is probably years away.
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