After the Buzz

One of twitters main features, even if not visible in the first place, is its simplicity. Even though uncountable third party applications have extended the original functionality, the set of features twitter offers hasn’t increased since its launch in 2006. But twitter has to move on in order to maintain its leading position in the microblogging market.

"What the Fail Whale has been up to" by cote

Twitter is one of the web’s phenomenons these days. Another company with a non-existent revenue model, but a massive and very loyal user base, ambitious third party developers and a significant impact on both personal and business life as well as media, especially news coverage.

Unclear business model

Even though twitter has just managed to raise more funds, a final business model is not in sight. Many theories about how twitter could be profitable in the future are around, if its a premium-account model or a way of monetizing the massive flow of information coming in every second in terms of selling marketing-data to those interested.

The need for innovation

Twitter has been a revolution for the web by putting a very easy, yet essential question in the focus of their efforts: “What are you doing?”. This could be every day stuff like going to the uni or shopping, but also sitting in a plane that just crashed or being arrested in Egypt. But since the very first tweet, only a few real additions have been made, bringing more value to the original service itself. A major add-on was the aquisition of Summize in July 2008. This feature added a powerful real-time search engine which channels and immediately displays what is going on in the twitterverse. But twitter cannot rest on this acquisition, they need to extend the service, making it more versatile and powerful than it is now.

Binding the users, offering more value

The next step for twitter could be, without letting the users down by creating a second, blown-up Facebook , to let them define topics they are interested in. These topics can be your favourite sports team, your hometown or people. When a predefined topic gets popular (a measure could be the amount of Re-Tweets in a certain amount of time), the most re-tweeted tweet could automatically be inserted into the timeline. This feature could surely be achieved by a third party programmer which just uses a normal account and an intelligent background service, but in terms of innovation, twitter really should implement this feature into its system itself, therefore gaining offering more value in terms of real-time-search.

This measure would target two of the most important groups using twitter:

• Private people who are interested in “what’s going on” and
• Professionals, especially marketers, who are in need for time critical information and monitoring information

This of course would be a another direct attack on Google, which still lacks a real-time search and could drive many users directly to twitter rather than using Google as a search engine for time critical news.

And of course, this could be another solution to monetize the service itself, being part of a larger pricing model.

What do you think, which features should be implemented into twitter to improve the service?

{UPDATE: Twitter has just announced that one part of the business model will be to offer pro accounts for companies.}

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