Hail Whale

…and as the world watched with bated breath, Twitter said ‘no deal‘ to Facebook. The primary reasons cited were the worth of Facebook stock (which was a key component in the payment) and the fact that Twitter wanted a shot at building revenues. Now that the deal is off, Mashable has a take on who Facebook should actually be looking to acquire. Among the lot, my picks would be Imeem and Jaxtr.

Technically, Facebook also has a status updating mechanism built into its new design, but despite its massive popularity as a social network it hasn’t come close to the popularity that Twitter has managed to gain – a whopping 343% YOY as on Sep 2008. More than a billion tweets have been tweeted so far. The fun part is that both these popular entities have been struggling for revenues. So, what makes Twitter so popular? I think the one key factor is the simplicity. Although we’ve gone beyond the ‘what are you doing’ part, whatever has to be done has to be still within 140 characters. But there’s no limit to the number of characters you can find there. 😉 One more factor is the amazing army of twitter based apps that seem to increase in leaps and bounds daily. While Facebook has apps that are (in general) what could be termed as frivolous, the majority of Twitter apps (there are exceptions)  either enhance the service or utilise the service to provide a new dimension altogether.

I saw a couple of interesting posts on how Twitter could develop further. The first, an article on Business Week, took examples of other microblogging services, and the second, on TechCrunchIT, wtites about how Twitter can become the single post office of the variety of services that we use on the net – the aggregator + conversation model that seems to be working well for Friendfeed.

Meanwhile, after some consideration on the deal, I think I might have liked to see my facebook updates automatically sent to twitter, and the comments on them shown on FB too. I’d have liked to see the follow function used on Facebook, so that I can have some level of filtration before being friends. In fact Twitter already does that for me already, a kind of filtration, a sort of checking the person out for shared interests, wavelength etc before adding on FB. After all, Twitter is ‘permission based stalking‘, and fast paced tweet streaming of many to many. Facebook would complement that perfectly by being there for one to one interactions.

Twitter is a trust economy, where one person judges another’s credibility and expertise over a period of time through his tweets. And this one to one relationship then replicates itself over and over. The wisdom of crowds makes it easy for a bluff to be called. This is the basis of twitter’s community. Yesterday’s Twitterstream of Mumbai’s events made me realise a few things. Rather, it reaffirmed a couple of notions, and made me question my faith on twitterati, much to my grief. It reaffirmed that while Twitter is great for breaking news, it is extremely difficult to filter out the ‘noise’ and get ready information. It reaffirmed that traditional media, especially television channels, have a powerful tool in twitter, but they need to step out of broadcasting and develop a unique mechanism for twitterverse. Lastly it reaffirmed that inspite of the fail wails when the fail whale appears,  Twitter is loved and respected as a news source enormously. The uncomfortable part, I realised that a ‘dark side’ beckons even on twitter, tweople are people after all (duh), and are not incorruptible when it comes to using a situation (however tragic it might be) to divert some attention to themselves.

until next time, any system that humans create is fallible ?

PS. a round of applause for @vinu & @dina some priceless work on a dark, crazy night…and day!!

PPS. A few interesting Twitter based services I’ve come across recently. In addition to this amazing laundry list, there’s TweetBeep, TweetScribe ( mechanisms similar to Google Alerts), Tweader (that threads Twitter conversations), TwitteRel, JustTweetIt (find users with similar interests), Twitrratr (a grading system that helps the + and – tweets on a person, topic etc, though the system is very simplistic), TwitWall (to share videos, mp3, photos etc), Splitweet (handle multiple twitter accounts and brand monitorizing) Tweeple Twak (in addition to the Qwitter and CityTweets type of data, it tells you how your followers have expanded over time and geography). In fact, as this post shows, you can pretty much link everything using Twitter. In fact, Twitter could even become your virtual personal assistant. 🙂