Twitter is only becoming more fascinating to larger groups of people. The possibilities are expanding even while we await an announcement about a business model.
The Singularity Hub blog posted an interesting thought about the idea of a tweetbomb which is like a virtual Flash Crowd or Flash Mob. Twitter has this possibility where blogs (and even blog rallies) do not. Repressive governments beware!
Many commentators remain mesmerized by the real time search possibilities (eg Twitscoop, Tweetmeme) in tracking what is going on in the Twitterstream. This strikes me as an amazing by-product of Twitter, but not the core of its value. My own thinking is that Twitter should learn a little from Google. It should embrace its universal nature, promise and try not to be evil, and offer premium corporate services for a fee, leveraging its universality and simplicity. I see both corporate social media revenue opportunities, and automated enterprise uses. In either case, Twitter would charge for high volume usage, and would charge for ancillary services (SLAs, security options, archive options, multi-account management etc).
To reinforce some of this, let me repeat and expand on a previous post when reporting on my presentation at Social Media Jungle Boston in March. In that presentation I posit that automated tweeting is a hidden opportunity and possible future for Twitter, alongside its very human current incarnation. In the comments of that post, I added a few examples of automated tweeting and consolidate them here.
Here is a commercial idea that is in use: a semi-automated tweet when fresh stuff ready at the bakery. Check out the video on Vimeo. I also found a (completely non-commercial) great tweeting cat door.
I also heard about Zappo's real time sales map: a real-time automated (mapped) data stream of sales made ... if sent to twitter simultaneously this would be another example of my hypothesis, and is pretty close, wouldn't you say? The a grand "now" dashboard from Sprint, is also on the same topic, showing the power of automated sharing of mechanically collected data (although this widget may in fact be "calculated" data rather than "collected" data).
Finally, here are the slides (again), and the video of the presentation.
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