twitter future trends

stephencater.com

tweeting to searching

more than google

blabbers, sifters and broadcasters

online news shift

gated community

fragmentation

powered by twitter

open source api

as a business model

what’s killing twitter?

content

tweeting to searching

the noise is growing

as more users sign up the signal-to-noise ratio is dropping

because of twitters nature it’s becoming harder to hear everyone of your followers

increasingly the only way to find useful information will be the search tool

more than google

there have been many pretenders to the google search throne

many are saying that twitter offers more:near real-time results; human filtered; follow search topic tweets; and trending topics

blabbers, sifters and broadcasters

blabbers:

continue to ‘bla bla bla’ about what they ate at lunch

sifters:

will use twitter to check the word on the street and the latest news

broadcasters:

keep pumping out tweets

online news shift

the rise of twitter in Iran also reflects a fundamental shift in the nature of news

government and media outlets are no longer the gatekeepers to news

‘citizen journalism’ is the added value

twitter reporters have reported from plane crashes, terror attacks, and natural disasters

there’s no guarantee traditional news sources can keep up

gated community

recently twitter has suffered from increasing spam and frivolous users

just as users can secure their updates, groups of users could create their own secured twitter neighbourhoods

fragmentation

twitter has many potential paths for future developments

this may lead it to fragment its current functionality into separate services

for example: search, news, micro-blogging

powered by twitter

in a similar fashion to the effect of wordpress,

we are likely to see more 3rd parties adapting the twitter platform to new services and applications

eg. microsoft’s ‘exec tweets’ exectweets.com

vw’s twitter ad banner adapt

open source

collaboration and open source data is a growing trend online from facebook connect to google maps - everyone has access to the database

twitter is no different

its openness brings the opportunity for collaboration from other developers

the already vast resource of tools that use the twitter api is a heads up as to what will happen in the future

as a business model

right now it has no business model as is basing itself solely on estimated worth

they’ve turned down acquisition offers

they’re thinking about an advertising model

transition into an e-commerce has been discussed

whatever they decide to do, this step will make or break twitter

what’s killing twitter?

constant hemorrhaging of the twitter api can put a severe strain on the service

users are up in arms with the lack of communication from about the service's problems

they intend to replace the existing system component by component. that will take too long for users and possibly result in even more downtime

it's more than clear that twitter is digging its own grave with tons of help from both inside and outside the company

the question then becomes: where will you go if or when twitter dies?