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Broadcasting Your Status
The thing I love most about the era of web services we are in is that no web service/company owns the entire stack. As massive as Google is, they only “own” one, maybe two, layers of the value chain (search and CPC ad services). They may be on their way to owning a few more. Maps certainly comes to mind. And with the purchase of YouTube, they certainly own my web video platform of choice.
But the web value chain is huge and there are so many important services out there. Want a marketplace? There’s eBay. Want hosted storage, bandwith, and servers? There’s Amazon. Want knowledge? There’s wikipedia. Want classifieds? There’s craigslist. Want photos? Flickr and Photobucket and Slide. Want bookmarks? There’s delicious. Want feeds? There’s FeedBurner. Want social networks? MySpace and Facebook. I could go on and on but I’ll spare you.
And because of open APIs, feeds, and mashups, users and developers can mix and match these services together to create a better web experience for everyone. These services and many others combine to create the infrastructure of the Internet.
After using Twitter for the better part of the past month, I think it is going to join that list if they haven’t already. What exact role is Twitter going to play? It will be the status broadcasting system of the Internet.
I don’t change my away message on my instant messaging client very often. When I am away, I’m not there to do it. But if I can send a text message to Twitter and it just happens, I’ll do that.
I don’t change my avatar’s audio as much as I’d like. But if I can send a text message to Twitter and it just happens via text to voice, I’ll do that.
I don’t consume local services very often on my phone because it’s a hassle to log in and tell them where I am. But if I could just send a text message to Twitter with my location and information starts coming to me on my phone, I’ll do that.
If all these things happen because of one text message I sent to Twitter, that's fantastic.
Like many of the services on that list above, Twitter doesn’t try to do too much. It's a place on the web where I can broadcast my status (whatever that means to me). But I can do that via the web, SMS, and IM. And I can subscribe to other users’ status via the same three messaging systems. And it’s all open because anyone’s status is a feed.
Someone said to me today that Twitter is a "SMS to feed platform". I think it’s a bit more than that, but like all great web services, the people who built it reduced Twitter to its simplest usable form and let the users decide what to do with it.
I am primarily using it to update my “status box” on my left sidebar using text messaging on my phone. Others prefer SMS in/SMS out, web in/SMS out, IM in/web out, SMS in/RSS out. Or combos of these modes. It doesn’t matter.
Twitter is a simple but flexible status broadcasting system. The web doesn’t have one yet and so Twitter is going to be it.
POSTSCRIPT: When I sent this post in draft form to Andrew, he replied, "yes, but ..." He thinks Twitter can be even more, possibly replacing text messaging as the dominant form of mobile messaging. I have to dig into that a bit. When I do, I'll blog my thoughts and Andrew's in a follow on post.
Comments (11) | Posted April 20, 2007 in Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
twitter allows for "declarative availability" http://webworkerdaily.com/2007/04/19/busyness-vs-burst-why-corporate-web-workers-look-unproductive/
It also underpins "ambient intimacy". http://www.disambiguity.com/ambient-intimacy/
I like it because its global from day one, unlike Jott say
http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2007/04/20/twitter-vs-jott-one-world-vs-one-country-aanvangsleerfase-overslaan/
I agree about its potential role in the web structure, and i think one thing you dont fully develop in your analysis is where the simplicity is felt most powerfully -in the API. developers seem to LOVE the twitter api. almost no barriers to entry. new apps and services popping up everywhere. the fastest API adoption in history? it could be.
Posted by: James Governor | Apr 20, 2007 6:55:25 AM
Interesting post Fred.
I've long been describing Twitter as "IM-lite, blogging-lite, location awareness-lite", all of which feed into your suggested category of status message broadcasting.
On whether it will replace SMS - well - I spent a lot of time at Edinburgh airport yesterday sending text messages to Twitter since it was easier to broadcast the situation from there than to send direct SMS to individuals. It's also a bit of a chat mechanism. Unfortunately, the text updates didn't occur until some time later, since the SMS interface was down...
I agree that it is in a new category of infrastructure service. I would never have thought it when I started out using it.
Incidentally, I saw this post was up from your Twitter status message...
Posted by: andyp | Apr 20, 2007 6:56:19 AM
I'm still figuring it out but really having fun with it along the way. I wrote a past last week about my thoughts on twitter for me.
http://sabet.typepad.com/bijanblog/2007/04/a_week_of_twitt.html
Posted by: bijan | Apr 20, 2007 7:22:04 AM
I think Twitter is great because it builds on very successful existing paradigms - IM/blog/chat and takes them one step further, mashing them all up into one convenient tool.
For me, Twitter is a lightweight blogging tool, an offline chat and a universal 'away message'.
Their API adoption has been indeed amazing, which brings me to the shameless plug of the day :) I was pleasantly surprised to read your twitt referring me to this blog post, on the same day we've released TwittyTunes - a Firefox extension that works with FoxyTunes and allows posting the songs you're listening to, to Twitter. 'Listening to music' is a very important status for many people, and 'Now playing' is a very popular type of IM away message. Updating Twitter with currently playing music can be the next logical step...
http://foxytunes.com/twittytunes/
Posted by: Alex | Apr 20, 2007 8:32:20 AM
You're comment on online service segmentation in the second paragraph, reminded me of a recent post on my blog devoted to YubNub.org, a web service for which I've become a (completely unofficial) evangelist.
The link is http://attentionbandit.blogspot.com/2007/04/yubnub-my-new-homepage.html.
YubNub a simple, quick-loading site that allows you to query all the web services/sites you mentioned and hundreds more by appending codes to the front of your query, g for google, wp for wikipedia, am for amazon, etc. I've been using it as my homepage for a few weeks, and am a big fan. Hopefully you will be to.
BTW, the blog is new, but I've got some interesting stuff in the pipe if you feel like checking back.
Keep up the good work with A VC.
Posted by: Eddie | Apr 20, 2007 9:44:47 AM
Hi Fred,
I agree that everyone knows Twitter is going to factor heavily into the mix, but as what, exactly, we don't quite know.
Like most, I've been pondering the potential of Twitter, and suggested early on that it might serve as content platform. (see http://www.ckwebb.com/internet/twitter-universal-content-delivery-system/)
As you point out, the great thing about these web services is with an available API, users will create all sorts of ways to leverage these platforms.
Posted by: Chris Webb | Apr 20, 2007 4:16:18 PM
I wish Twitter would replace email chains for my group of friends. I'm sick of 50+ "re:" email chains... replace it with Twitter... send 'em to email or IM or text and let me reply.
I also wish that cingular wouldn't block the twitter texts.
Posted by: Rick | Apr 20, 2007 9:38:14 PM
I continue to struggle with Twitter. I think the "where am I now" is the interesting application (at least for me), but then I have lots of times when I don't want people to know "where I am now." One day I'm excited about broadcasting my location; the next day I'm not. I guess that's the problem with being an introvert/extrovert.
Posted by: Brad Feld | Apr 21, 2007 1:33:22 PM
well brad if you're not in the mood to post your location then don't. its a nice thing about twitter- it relies on fairly explicit declarations.
Posted by: James Governor | Apr 23, 2007 8:25:16 AM
I really don't understand twitter. Facebook has had this feature (status) for longer, and its being used by more than just the techy/sxsw crowd. Not to mention my social network is all already in Facebook, and only a small subset of these people have even heard of Twitter, much less used it.
Don't get me wrong, its a great feature, but I haven't fully understood its power.
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Posted by: Suresh | Aug 3, 2007 5:57:15 AM
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