OK, so maybe it’s late to write about “initial thoughts” on Twitter, since the rest of the techno-savvy world has been twittering for months. I’ve been at it for a couple of weeks, mostly as an experiment in activity-logging to see if it would make me more productive (er, it hasn’t). At any rate, here are my two cents:
Pro: Getting data in and out
What I like abut Twitter is the ease of getting “tweets” in and out. You can enter information on the web, from your cellphone and from IM. Also, there are a number of applications out there now that allow you to enter tweets from inside and outside your browser. The number of Twitter apps is pretty astounding, actually.
Getting information out is pretty easy and flexible too. I have my tweets broadcast to friends and family through Plaxo Pulse and Facebook. Since very few of my real-world or virtual friends are using Twitter, they can still see what I’m up to in the spaces where we usually interact.
Con: Where’s the metadata?
Twitter is essentially a short-term broadcasting system. As the instructions say, users enter “what they are doing, right now”. Twitter accounts can be public (appearing on a public timeline on Twitter’s main page) or private (allowing access only to those you invite). Users can also respond to the tweets of others, either publicly or privately.
It’s not clear to me how long the tweets are stored in a user’s stream, but presumably, once someone has been Twittering for a while, there will be quite a record of past thoughts, accomplishments, activities, etc. Twitter could be a record, not only of “What I’m doing right now”, but of what I have done, what I’ve wanted to do, etc.
Therein lies the rub, because for Twitter to be useful as a record-keeping device, it will have to be much easier to sort, classify and search information. After all, isn’t tagging the sine qua non of web 2.0 services? Even for those who are not interested in Twitter as an archive, tags could be a vital enhancement. One could distinguish by tag which tweets are related to work, hobbies, etc. Fellow twitterers could choose to see all your tweets or only those related to an interest you share.
Tags could also describe the content of the message, distinguishing between weblinks, random thoughts, and actual “what I’m doing right now” statements. The up-and-coming service Pownce is a bit better than Twitter in this regard, because it allows the user to distinguish between messages that are notes, links, files or events. One can of course announce events or send links through Twitter, but Pownce actually adjusts the entry form and the format of the message according to the type of data it contains. For example, event messages will have places and locations, links will have urls, etc. This makes information easier to enter and to interpret. It also potentially makes it easier to sort and reuse… imagine pulling all of the Pownce messages that contain events into an iCal feed for example. If the service takes off, Pownce could become, not only a Twitter-killer, but an Upcoming killer, del.icio.us-killer, etc. If this is what they have in mind,the Pownce team is rather ambitious indeed! or maybe they’re just pushing to be bought by Yahoo <wink>.
The other nice thing about Pownce is that one can choose to send messages to individuals, selected groups or the general public. This allows messages to be more targeted to particular audiences, but in many cases it will limit the audience to people actually signed up for Pownce. The disadvantage of Pownce is related to my earlier comment about getting information in, and especially out. Pownce is still in its infancy and is expected to release an API soon, which should address the limited variety of tools for getting information in. Then the problem will be how to take the messages out of one’s traditional friends/buddies list and make it more than a group chat tool. Given that Pownce’s main marketing tool seems to be the secret-beta-invitation-frenzy, they may not be that interested in allowing people to get the messages out.
