The Twitter Platform: 3 Years Old and Ready to Change the World
Twitter marked its 3rd birthday this weekend and the site that Nielsen called the fastest growing social network last month shows no signs of slowing down. While active participation by users is a great show of strength, the use of Twitter as a platform for developers and aggregate data analysis is the most exciting thing about the company.
The story of Twitter as a platform is just beginning; the most exciting developments are still to come. Below we share our three favorite examples of what Twitter is becoming; these 3rd party uses of the service point the way for the larger Twitter ecosystem to become even more important in the future. We're not talking about Twitter clients, we're talking about Twitter data mining.
When I first heard about Twitter, I thought it was the stupidest thing I'd heard of in a long time. Now I am constantly surrounded by people who talk more about Twitter than anything else - and I don't mind at all. You can feel the creative tension just waiting to explode from around Twitter, can't you? If you have used it much, then you'll understand where that energy is coming from. If you haven't really gotten into Twitter then all this energy probably seems absurd - but there's no way you can deny that it's building.
Of course it's not just about Twitter the company. "Microblogging" in general has world-changing potential as long as the content is publicly and programmatically available. This is not Facebook, with its complex web of private connections, hidden content and limited APIs. Those are related phenomena, but Twitter is quite distinct and could be much more important. Things could keep moving in the same direction but led by another company, as well.
Twitter as Zeitgeist
"Meme trackers," sentiment engines, social media data-mining services - all of these concepts are likely to become increasingly powerful as more people publish their thoughts online and companies roll out more sophisticated tools for analyzing those thoughts.
Twitter already "breaks news" faster than traditional media outlets on a regular basis and monitoring the ebb and flow of conversation is helping media, marketers and academics put their finger on the pulse of a significant number of people.
We've seen how breaking large numbers of Twitter followers into topical groups can help make the service much, much more useful. We expect to see services launched soon that will take the pulse of topical groups. Bubbling up hot topics early in the world of physicists on Twitter, real estate agents, stock traders, etc. is a powerful tactic that more than one company will cash in on. We'll all benefit when that happens, too.
Twitter As Real Time Communication
It's one thing to watch what the hottest items are across a large or small group of people, but even that can take some time to emerge. Savvy news organizations are making more granular use of Twitter than that. Twitter is also a powerful tool of one to one communication.
We wrote a year ago about how we watch Twitter for individual posts about breaking news, we use it to perform interviews with people we'd never be able to talk to as easily on the phone and we get editorial feedback from our Twitter friends after we've written posts.
Other organizations are leveraging individual Tweets even more seriously. Earlier this month we wrote about how tech news aggregator Techmeme accepts news tips from Twitter users. The tactic is relatively new and isn't particularly democratic (our numbers show a huge dominance by just a few people) but the most important part of that effort is this: Twitter tips help Techmeme find news that the site would have found eventually - even faster.
Techmeme has some hardcore engineering behind it: it tracks hot blog topics every 5 minutes - but the Twitter platform makes it even faster. That's pretty remarkable.
Show us a simple messaging tool that can be accessed through a wide variety of methods, using only a (hopefully) memorable username of the person you're trying to communicate with - and we'll show you a genre of technology that could disrupt not just email, it could disrupt telephony.
Twitter as Business and Competitive Intelligence.
What do you do when you find a ton of rapid, public, computer-accessible conversation going on among thought leaders, knowledge workers, corporate brand reps and all kinds of other professionals? You mine the crap out of that information to try to find a competitive advantage. That's what you do.
Some people are starting to do just that, but we're sure that the "brand monitoring" software that we're seeing pull in with Twitter is just the beginning.
For another small view of what's possible, check out our post from Friday titled "The Inner Circles of 10 Geek Heroes on Twitter." Imagine the possibilities.
These Are Early Days
We're not sure what the future will look like, but we suspect that the examples above provide some hints.
The future of the internet is very exciting - and a meaningful amount of that excitement will come from smart innovation built on top of Twitter and similar platforms.
You can follow the author of this post and ReadWriteWeb on Twitter. It's guaranteed to be worth your time.
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Happy Birthday Twitter!
Now you can "Talk to Twitter" by sending QuTweets - query tweets!
We just launched a service to find clinical trials using Twitter. http://blog.trialx.org/2009/03/now-you-can-talk-to-twitter-and-find.html
@trialx CT I'm 45 yo female with breast cancer looking for clinical trials in kansas city
we'll parse your health profile sentence and reply to you with a tinyurl to TrialX.org with matching clinical trials.
Let us know your feedback.
Best Regards,
Chintan, Co-founder, TrialX
You say that Twitter already "breaks news" faster than traditional media outlets. From what I've seen, the news that is mostly "broken" is pointers to traditional news outlets..so Twitter isn't really breaking news as much as just helping to get the news that has been created by news organizations out to people who probably lost interest in traditional media a long time ago.
Allen, that's a fair point. I think there's a fair amount of both going on.
Great graphics Marshall
Twitter is only another form of communication. That's it. Nothing all. It's no better than texting or instant messaging.
VlogHog - that is a classic lack of understanding. SMS and IM don't have APIs that allow for aggregate data analysis by anyone in the world. They aren't public, they are private. They are related but fundamentally different.
A peeping-tom's dream : an interactive Twitscoop overlaid on a map. Moving a lens with your mouse will instantly change the tagcloud to display current scoops of any given region of the world.
Want to see what's the buzz in Rio de Janeiro ? or Paris ?
More powerful than a set of webcams ...
Reminds me of an interactive visualization of Madrid where moving your cursor was instantly changing the noise level based on local GSM usage data ... (Medialab Prado I think ...)
An example of the Zoom, filter, analyze "Details-on-Demand" approach.
Allen Wise said...
From what I've seen, the news that is mostly "broken" is pointers to traditional news outlets
Vloghog said...
Twitter is only another form of communication. That's it. Nothing all. It's no better than texting or instant messaging.
Amen, Allen and Vloghog. You both nailed it. Twitter's breakn' news is gossips. The traditional media has the depth, if I need to find out more about breakn' news. Twitter has been hyped up by the likes of TechCrunch, RWW and O'Reilly radar.
I miss realtime large-scale Social Network Analysis in the background ...
So true, Marshall. Very good post. As the head of a research group dealing with information retrieval and machine learning, I can only underline the worth of the Twitter corpus for data mining tasks. As with the motivation for the Semantic Web, it is very hard to make a machine understand what it reads when crawling a Blog or so. Thus, the more structured the content is, the easier this task gets.
Twitter does not only provide structured posts in terms of author, date, topic (e.g. hash tags making it easier to understand what the tweet is about), it centralizes information at one place (making the task of permanently finding proper sources obsolete), makes the author's social graph traversable for further analysis, and finally made people publish something who did not publish before. All this helps facing tasks like Meme Tracking, Sentiment Analysis and Trend Mining.
We could say that Twitter is the Semantic Web for status updates.
-- Alex
Hi Marshall,
Thanks for the mention!
We're launching twitscoop v2 in the next few weeks, let me know if you'd like to be notified in advance.
Kind regards,
Pierre
(co-founder, twitscoop)
Haha... If John Mayer and Jen split because of Twitter, I am going to laugh!
We're launching a powerful new Twitter tool called ChatterBox soon!
Check out the site for updates: http://chatterboxhq.com, or follow the app on twitter: @chatterboxapp
Excellent post!! Twitter is like a breath of fresh air on the Social Media scene. I have been on it for just a few weeks now and I have met several interesting people. It is a platform to network with people you would like to meet in real life. Check me out!!
http://twitter.com/spryka
Agreed, I feel that Twitter is the best place to find real time information and info to help me make decisions for the future.
every once in a while i evangelize twitter to people as an example of what is relatively "new", but to be completely honest, I dont believe the hype myself. i think it had as much potential as rss feeds did in terms of realizing the "truly open data" mythology that blogs like rww love to ponder but of course it didn't get there; unsurprisingly perhaps... so what's left?
1. semantic gobbledy goop. remember when tags *didn't* replace static ontologies? i wonder why hash tags get so much attention.
2. a consistently slow (if pretty) experience
3. noise, noise, noise- oh wait i mean 'lifestreaming'. some guy professing love for some political hero or movie or meal he just ate is not compelling, mineable data to me. i'd be potentially interested in the outliers, but there's so much noise on twitter i wouldn't even bother going there to find out about it.
i think services like twitter could be useful but on a much much smaller scale and to a particular group only. a twitter setup for only news professionals, or people within a particular war zone. but then it wouldn't be twitter would it? instead its careening towards a myspace like future where everyone spams their minutiae and somehow feels really good about the whole thing.
Will twitter ever reach the masses? That's the question I am wondering about. They seem to have no business modell and while their idea was innovative, it is too easy to copy and to merge into existing applications. How long can it survie beeing under attack from both the OSS world (Laconica for example) making their software worthless and facebook blocking their entrance to the mass market?
If twitter does not find a niche in the next two years, it could suffer a similar fate like napster.
Very informative article. Recent integration of Twitter by Technorati also shows that other social media platforms are taking Twitter seriously. Happy Birthday Twitter.
Interesting stuff.
The many and varied applications of Twitter are illustrated well by how a handful of UK travel companies are using it to best effect. There are good lessons in there to be learned by all wanting to become part of the Twitterverse. We've blogged about it here: http://pr-media-blog.co.uk/come-fly-with-me-twitter-bird/