"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.}

Companies, products and services in this article:

About digital natives and immigrants

A digital native is a person who was born after 1980, while digital immigrants are the ones born before. The main difference between these two groups lies in their understanding and usage of modern technology.

While digital natives have grown up at a time in which radical changes in information technology affected daily life by offering more and more ways to interact, connect and gather information using technologies like the internet, digital immigrants sometimes often have to slowly catch up in terms of understanding and using modern media and technology.

Gaps between technology and society

The more time passed, the larger the gap between these two groups have become. The best example is the way children and young adults are told in school and university (even though the techniques and methods used here are quite more modern sometimes). Sitting in front of a blackboard for many hours, listening to the person at the front talking, writing down (paper based) notes and having no additional ways to research while questions arise (Wikipedia, Google search etc.) isn’t quite state-of-the-art teaching. The school example might be the best way to see one of the major problems that have arisen since the 1980’s:

• Digital natives are bored and impatient with the ones not being able to use modern media as fast, efficient and goal-oriented, sometimes resulting in an arrogance that might come close to antipathy
• Digital immigrants, especially older generations, tend to be “afraid” of new technologies, don’t want to expose themselves to those who grew up using these new possibilities and therefore tend to keep their old habits alive as long as possible, not wanting to be blamed for not being able to use modern technology in a way their younger colleagues, students or children do. This of course might lead to resignation in the end.

To transfer this situation into a more historical context, one just needs to cross out the word “digital”. Situations of immigrants coming to a country, religion or way of living they are not familiar with have happened ever since.

Referring to more traditional terms, the country in this situation shall be the internet. Digital natives are the ones that grew up in this country, knowing nearly everything about it. The immigrants came in and unlike many times in history, there were no open batlles, no fights about land and rights, but a quiet fight for hierachy in a digital world.

Crossroads

Based on this scenario, there are two directions this relationship can develop to within the next few years:

Broadening the gap

This possibility is the one that shall be avoided at any cost, because it will lead to a separation not only in the digital, but also the real world, caused by an increasing arrogance on the part of the digital natives and  a cumulative neglection causing the immigrants to avoid the ones being arrogant to them leading to a digital and real gap between the two groups, causing private, cultural and business life to separate.

The social way

Todays web is all about being social: Social networks, social bookmarking, social everything. The word “social” itself implies the following:

“Social refers to a characteristic of living organisms (humans in particular, though biologists also apply the term to populations of animals and insects). It always refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence, irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.” (Source: Wikipedia.com)

So its all about interacting with each other. The infrastructure of the modern internet has opened up new ways to connect, interact, share information and do business. The implications this socialization of the internet have led to clearly points out that people do want to share their lives and knowledge, so why not help the ones not being able to use modern forms of communications by now to learn to understand and use them more efficiently?

At the end of this thought, both groups, natives and immigrants lay down their prejudices against each other. Surely it’ll take some time and effort from both sides, but in the end there could be a digitally connected society, integrated and willing to share, interact and exchange.

Being invented in 1965 (Wikipedia), the 44-year-old messaging service is more mature than any other actively used consumer onlin messaging service to date. Of course this maturity has lead to many improvements over time, including security fixes and user friendliness. But on the other hand with the internet evolving, new demands and possibilities have risen for potential competitors.

In the last few months many discussions were focussed around the question wheather if the e-mail-service as we know will stand a chance against new services like instant messaging like ICQ or messaging functionalities of social networks like Facebook (which has around 175 million(!) users by now). From my point of view, the definite answer is yes, and here’s why:

• E-Mail is transparent
  • The underlying software of mail-servers and basic messaging principles have developed over time and therefore been improved over time. Protocols like POP, IMAP or SMTP are open.
  • Instant messaging and the mail functionality of social networks are a closed circuit. One can use it, but has no idea what going on behind the scenes.
• Attachments
  • You can attach virtually everything on an e-mail.
  • You can just send text inputs to other users on most social networking sites (but they’re working on this one).
• Security (especially considering business use)
  • E-Mail communication can be encrypted and monitored in-house if necessary.
  • Since social messaging services are not open, one has to have faith in the operator.
• “What if”-scenario (Service goes bancrupt…)
  • With E-Mail you can export your whole mail-account and import it into a new program or SAAS (software as a service) application and just continue your work.
  • Competitors don’t allow you to integrate their messaging service with other services. Furthermore you can’t epxort your conversations. If the service goes down, your messages do, too.
• Interoperability
  • E-Mail is an open standard
  • You can’t send messages to other networks (for example from Facebook to MySpace).
• Implementation and ease of use on mobile devices
  • Since about ten years nearly every mobile phone has a built in e-mail-client, allowing the user to check and write mails. Setup has become really easy and the bandwith used (amount and price) is really low
  • There is no standard for social messaging on mobile phones yet, so one has to use slimmed versions of the original site (see m.facebook.com for an example). Furthermore messaging is not the core functionality of social networking sites, so one always has to click through a few links to get to ones messages)

But the most important argument why the classical e-mail-service will successfully co-exist is the simple fact that due to the increased amount of available ways to connect to a person (lets say a website owner), the more people will use ways which require not much effort. While a direct message on twitter or messaging within social networks is only a click away, an e-mail requires quite more input. This effectively leads to more users not sending e-mails but to use other forms of messaging which puts an e-mail down in terms of quantity, but raises its claim to quality.

Seen from the point of view of the person receiving messages (like the mentioned website author), many information will arrive on many channels every day. And while each channel has its advantages and disadvantages, the amount of e-mails a perosn receives will decline due to the other possible channels,  therefore making a received e-mail stand out.

Companies, products and services in this article: