Tweetorial

I’ve been seeing several sites recently trying to take the online offline – ActiveCiti, MeetUp, to a certain extent AroundMe, but I wonder if any of them would ever get the kind of enthusiasm that the recent tweet up in Mumbai received. That got me thinking of Twitter….again. Though I feel its a bit too late to answer the question “Par, Bhaiya, hum twitter kyun karte hain”, I’ve never actually dedicated an entire post to twitter, so here goes.

In case you haven’t convinced yourself on Twitter, here’s a good post on its different uses. Of course, the plethora of applications that are developed on a daily basis keep adding to this list. Take, for instance, the tweet up I was talking about. I just read an article about a new Twitter app called Twitly, which allows you to create groups on Twitter. Imagine how useful it would be in the case of this tweet up,  when used in conjunction with say, Tweetparty.

And that’s not all, just take a look at a few of the services that are being built based on the Twitter way of life- TwitHire (jobs), Phweet (Calling Twitter friends), Blippr (Reviews), ToAnswer (like Yahoo Answers) and that’s just four out of an army of Twitter tools I’ve written about earlier.

All of which begs the question – how does Twitter make money. Well, they have got some funding, but the quest is on for the revenue model. A few links that suggest possible revenue models. You’ll notice that most of them hinge around ads – both search based as well as personal tweet data based; a freemium model, and enterprise solutions. Twitter must be careful though, on the ads front, lessons to be learnt from Facebook. Monetising or at least streamlining certainly seems to have become priority to them, if the limiting of followers and scrapping of SMS updates from its UK based number are any indication. The evil mind wonders if its a ploy to get users to suggest a revenue model and then implement it. 😉 That would fit perfectly for a service that made its failure a brand. (the fail whale). And whatever Twitter does, has a way of being cool. But seriously, what Twitter needs to do is work on its architecture.

I, for one, believe Twitter’s popularity lies in its simplicity. At the end of the day, it’s basically one gigantic chatroom, with two twists – the following concept, and the 140 character limit. A clean interface, nothing like Facebook (that puts off a few people), and most importantly two things – it is short and instant, the credo of this generation (Remember IPL?), and it appeals to the voyeur in us – a constant feed of lifestreams (Remember Reality shows?)

And meanwhile, users got around to building things around it. The best part is that these tools which users have built are perfect brand building material – use Twitter Search, or maybe Monitter, to find out what people are talking about your brand/category, engage your consumers, and perhaps do something exciting like what Zappos has done. Just ensure you don’t get into a list like this.

Lastly, can Twitter be the flagbearer for the age of conversation? I’d say yes. TechCrunch has a wonderful article that explains it brilliantly. I have tried Friendfeed too, but still prefer Twitter. So much so, that I usually rely on Twitter now to break news, after all who can beat the millions of connected citizen reporters out there?

until next time, tweet dreams