Twitter as Communications Platform

One of the reasons why Twitter's audience has grown so quickly is because its open API has allowed a multitude of applications to be developed to support and enhance the Twitter-universe.

The basis of Twitter's popularity is very simple, elegant, and potentially addictive: send super short messages (maximum 140 characters) to groups of "followers" via web, SMS, or IM and receive the same messages from all of your "friends." Now, TechCrunch reports this morning that "a subtle upcoming change to Twitter's API" will allow for more advanced functionality.

Dave Winer writes that there is "no user-level functionality yet to report," but that he will keep us posted.

The idea will be that you can send a simple "command" message such as "weather" or "score" to a specific "follower" and that profile will generate information in response, i.e. "It's hailing, take cover" or "Your boys are getting smacked by 'Bama," or whatever.

Again, this simple premise may have yet another profound impact on Twitter's penetration. Particularly for the mobile set, Twitter has the potential to become a dominant communications tool, not only for receiving and transmitting idle chatter, but for collecting quick and relevant information as well.

Businesses will build atop this platform. Sports updates, stock quotes, specific news and information queries, restaurant and club reviews, album and record reviews (send the ISBN or UPC code and instantly receive a 1-10 score as voted on by users, let's say): the sky's really the limit, all focused upon short, simple, and fast. That's the killer app.

Is MyBlogLog Losing Its Buzz?

Don't get me wrong, I really dig MyBlogLog, the simple and stripped down social networking tool for bloggers with the killer app widget that lets you see and interact with the readers who visit your site.

But I'm wondering if the buzz is wearing off. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the activity level on the site has subsided considerably since the admittedly recent days when blogger-fueled hype was high and the announcement of MBL's acquisition by Yahoo! was making the rounds.

Certainly for several months it seemed as though there was a lot of activity on the site itself. I received friend requests frequently for example (see my profile here without doing much to earn the honor, and it was easy to tell just by clicking around that many people were discovering and making use of the site's features. I'm not getting that sense of late. My activity level on the site is about the same, but the number of friend requests and messages has dropped considerably.

Perhaps even more telling is that I haven't read anything about MyBlogLog in a while (this Technorati chart is a bit inconclusive, I must admit). Could it be that the early adopter crowd has incorporated MBL into ho hum everyday online life and moved on? I'm guilty myself, having caught the Twitter wave and am very much fixating on that particular e-vortex as the latest-greatest thing.

While Alexa rankings must be taken with a grain of salt, it shows that MBL traffic has leveled off. It's still ahead of Twitter, though it's close now!

I still appreciate and love MyBlogLog's best feature: I get to see the faces (or avatars, or artistic representations) of some of the people who stop by my site.

I'd love to see what other people think: what's the deal with MyBlogLog these days?

Politics and MySpace, "the leading social networking blogosphere"?

I love Howard Fineman. He's one of the best political writers in the business. He's great on Hardball, and his coverage and analysis of elections and the pure sport of politics is second-to-none.

But still, it's hilarious when non-tech savvy journalists wade into those electronic weeds.

The Internet is now a part of politics as it never has before. As Fineman rightly notes, it was Howard Dean's (and Joe Trippi's) success in raising money and building grassroots community online in 2003 that ushered political campaigns into a new era. Politics and politicians have always followed the money, and therefore 2008 presidential hopefuls are online and actively seeking advantage, dollars, and voters. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama broke away from the long tradition of officially announcing a presidential campaign in a hometown dripping from its very pores in Americana, for example, and instead announced via online video.

Politicians are now seeking ways to integrate technology into their relationship with constituents as well. Obama has made at least one appearance on popular left-leaning political blog Daily Kos during the run-up to the pivotal 2006 midterm elections, and '08 presidential aspirant John Edwards delivers regular posts on Twitter, the newest rage of the tech-bloggy set. (Edwards staff has thanked his "followers" on Twitter for all of their words of support over the recent announcement that Elizabeth Edward's breast cancer has returned.)

Journalists are trying to keep up. It's chuckle-worthy every time that Hardball's Chris Matthews (another favorite of mine) announces that features and video clips can be found online. He has a look of smirking wonder that seems to say, "There's this thing called the Internet and people actually do stuff there, can you believe it?"

This week, in the midst of an interesting-as-usual piece called "Out of Control," which looks at how technology and the media now leave political candidates with less control over the message of campaigns than ever before, Fineman let this beauty slip: "Last time I checked, MySpace, by far the leading social networking blogosphere, had more than 60 million registered members."

The leading social networking blogosphere. If only he had just scaled it back half a notch and left it at "leading social networking website." Or platform, tool, place, locale, or e-shack of misbegotten ill designed schlock. But blogosphere has a pretty clear if broad connotation, representing that vast array of millions of blogs, most of which are separate online entities from one another.

MySpace certainly has millions of profiles, all of which have a blog feature. So I suppose it would be okay to call MySpace a blogosphere unto itself, though I would wager that's going a bit too far. And it would be definitely be inaccurate to compare that "blogosphere" with the blogosphere.

So MySpace is not a social networking blogosphere. It's a huge and monstrous social networking site. The blogosphere is its own universe (thus the 'sphere!) and many who occupy it are more than happy to not be associated with MySpace.

Howard, we love you, but you gaffed a little on this one!

Twitters of the Day: Starbucks, Han Solo, and Netscape

Lots of great stuff coming out of Twitter (the wunderkind short, simple, and snappy tool that lets you post 140-character maximum rants, pontifications, links, and random musings about personal peccadilloes to groups of "followers"), I may have to make Twitters of the Day a regular feature.

Jason Calacanis: correcting WSJ errors at my blog. uhhhh.... dont even work there anymore and i'm fighting the good fight. i guess i need to let it go huh?

Jason is referring to his spirited defense against a Wall Street Journal piece that claims that Netscape traffic is way down since the switch over to the "new" social news-driven platform (which I have declared, with its problems and all, is the future of news). Like many arguments, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle on this one. That said, Netscape is a perfect choice to continue to lead out a broad-based general audience social news experiment. I just wish that their editors were a little less trigger happy on editing/yanking submissions and would more closely cooperate with submitters and publishers, without whom the site would have no content.

Bloggers Blog: Will newspapers/magazines make all the journalists Twitter like they made them blog?

There are a bunch of great and interesting and probing questions that sweep Twitter everyday. I think this one is a little bit tongue-and-cheek but I do think it likely that some journalists will get on board with Twitter before too long. We may see reporters in battle zones giving live on-the-ground snippets, anchors at the desk musing about life on the news set during commercial breaks, and solicitations for questions prior to interviews. Pretty cool stuff in other words, and it all lies ahead.

Bloggers Blog: Poor Han Solo. Darth Vader is crushing him in followers 1250 to 56

Bloggers Blog delivered the goods today! There are a bunch of fake Twitter profiles, which I see as a sign of the site's health and popularity. I haven't friended any of them yet, so if any of them are particularly funny, please let me know.

Robert Scoble: I told Dave to pop up some Starbucks ads on TwitterVision just to freak everyone out. http://twittermap.com/twittervision -- I'm addicted.

Ah, that rascally Scobleizer. TwitterVision is a site to behold, a really easy and mesmerizing way to see how this simple little product is providing yet another short cut to instant and immersive (and even substantive, sometimes!) conversation between friends and followers and lurkers around the globe.

Drop me a line at my Twitter page. You'll be hooked before long!

Twitter of the Day: Take Over the World Style

Best Twitter "twit" of the day that I ran across comes from Ben Yoskovitz: I'm up. It's early. Ready to take over the world. You with me?

Now that I am down with. Get the coffee fired up and the Firefox tabs a flying.

My Twitter page, by the way, can be found here.

This Is The End Of The Twitter As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Lifecycles and trendcycles keep getting faster and faster. Just as I was getting up to speed and offering some limited pontifications about the mini-phenomenon known as Twitter, its demise is already being predicted.

Twitter is a simple to use and potentially addictive service that allows you to post very short messages to groups of friends via web, phone, or SMS based upon the premise of what are you doing right now? So for example, I'm hopping over there at this very second and writing "I'm doing the bloggings" (check this at my personal Twitter page), which automatically sends that riveting message to all of my Twitter friends.

web1979, who claims to have "vintage 1979 eyes," boils down the argument to three points: there's no value (or no there there), it takes too much effort, and that key users or early adopters will bail.

While that's certainly possible, I think Twitter will be one of those things that stick around for the long haul, even when the buzz wears off. When I first wrote about Twitter, I was a little bit negative about it, so here's why I think it will be around far past 2007 (maybe even into 2008!):

* It has useful applications for events and conferences (the buzz it garnered at SXSW this week will carry over to tech-centric and then business-centric conferences for years to come).
* It's a very easy way for celebrities and politicians and industry leaders and bloggerati to stay in touch with fans and followers. It's pretty cool and says a lot about the candidate that John Edwards has been Twitter-ing during his presidential campaign, for example.
* The kids will use it, or The MySpace phenomenon if you like. As much as kids are attracted to social networking websites so that they can connect with one another while defining and expressing themselves, Twitter can act as a short cut to doing all of those things. Imagine high school home run circa 2007. What are you doing right now? I want to stick a fork in my eye. And so on.
* The web goes mobile. The web-mobile connection can't be discounted here. The ability to post and receive posts via mobile device is really the key functionality that will give Twitter staying power.