Do you remember the IT revolution? I barely do. But I’ve worked in Enterprise tech long enough to have filled in the blanks on what I was too young to see in the 80′s. Things started off as these one off efforts developed by hackers and cowboy programmers. (Not literal cowboys, of course, but for some reason in the 80′s cowboy meant wild and independent and eventually became a corporate term for a non team player.) Nothing worked together and when you had to get two applications to work together you had to bind them together with duct tape and bailing wire; aka custom code.
Eventually people started to publish on shared standards, programs started working together and applications started to scale. Instead of building your own IT application you could buy them virtually off the shelf. Then companies got bigger and started buying up one another. New job titles like IT Manager and CIO became legitimate job titles and everyone had to have one.
Right now we’re exiting the cowboy phase of one off applications and slowly moving beyond duct tape and bailing wire but there’s still more duct tape than there are standards. This post isn’t about standards though. It’s about the next phase when things really start to come together.
I like Twitter a lot. I get far more value out of Twitter than I do any other social network or communication tool I use. Close seconds include blogs, RSS feeds and email. For me Twitter’s value is in the quality of aggregated content not it’s size. But I’ve always felt there’s so much more that could be done with Twitter and microblogging as a whole, especially if Twitter were to be used more as infrastructure.
The possibility of Twitter powering communication applications beyond just tweets is something I was so passionate about I started a company to do that and then almost started a company to simply extend Twitter’s functionality (I’ve open sourced that business plan if you want it).
I’ve even given the example that people could use Twitter to power customer service widgets on their sites. You know those chat windows that pop up when you visit sites? Why couldn’t those be powered by Twitter instead of the expensive chat software that runs underneath them today?
Companies like Cotweet and Hy.ly turn Twitter into a customer support channel, why not just embed a widget on your site and extend that functionality? People wouldn’t even need a Twitter account to use it.
I’ve often wondered what Twitter would do with all the money it has raised and long proclaimed that acquisitions would be a big part of that. I still think advertising is the wrong way to go (or at least shouldn’t be the main form of monetization). I think the data they have their hands on is more valuable than anyone realizes yet. And there’s so much potential out there for what I call micropreneurs, people building small, lightweight applications on top of all these open API’s.
Twitter is still hard for normal people to use. It’s the social networking equivalent of command line prompts. As the little guys get big and the big guys start getting in the game we’re going to need a new user interface over all of this data and functionality that will continue to extend it well beyond how we use it today. Twitter clients like TweetDeck and mobile are the current UI’s making Twitter usable but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Photo credit By Tac Anderson
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