.Dust

In the last cou­ple of weeks I have been play­ing around with Twit­ter.

Per­son­ally I think it’s a cool idea. It’s a very sim­ple ser­vice that allows your friends or, if you don’t care much about your pri­vacy, strangers to be updated on what you are doing.

Using a mobile orig­i­nated SMS, an Instant Mes­sage or a Web page you can make a short state­ment on what you are doing in that par­tic­u­lar moment. At the same time your friends can be updated via SMS or using an RSS feed. Cool!

This is a sim­ple ser­vice with a great poten­tial. They have the oppor­tu­nity to enhance the ser­vice in so many dif­fer­ent ways.

One of the most inter­est­ing point on Twit­ter is the mobil­ity stuff. You can send updates via SMS and receive updates via SMS. I think this is the most inno­v­a­tive area of the ser­vice. Per­son­ally I would not like to update my friends say­ing that I’m work­ing on one of those bor­ing Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tions while I’m sit­ting at my desk. Instead I would to say them that I’m enjoy­ing a per­fect meal in a fancy new restau­rant, or that I’m walk­ing on the sea­side, or some­thing else like this.

This kind of sce­nario implies that I will be mov­ing around with no access to any per­sonal com­puter. But, as we know, mobile phone are ubiq­ui­tous. I always have my mobile phone with me and, pos­si­bly, SMS will always work on any net­work, even in a roam­ing situation.

Let’s just try to imag­ine how the ser­vice may evolve:

• The step from SMS to MMS is a sim­ple one. Let’s not tell my friend what I am doing, let’s show them what I am doing. MMS is pow­er­ful. It can hold images, videos and sounds (also recorded with the phone voice recorder application).
• If I’m hold­ing my phone with me chances that the oper­a­tor know where I am are very high. Not talk­ing about GPS but sim­ple cell based loca­tion would be enough. Tell my friends what I am doing and where I am doing it.
• The update may be sent via a sim­ple voice call or video call and at the same time your friend may receive a voice call or a video call with the update or your mes­sage may be pack­aged in an MMS and sent to your friends.

Com­bin­ing these two ele­ments would boost the ser­vice appeal. Well, at least to me!

Inter­est­ing to notice that adding media capa­bil­ity to twit­ter will make the RSS feed a pod­cast or vid­cast with­out any has­sle for the user.
I think that pos­si­bil­i­ties are pretty much infi­nite. Let’s just think at some mashup com­bin­ing loca­tion data with other ser­vices like Google Maps and Google Video or YouTube.

Why do I blog this? Well, any sin­gle time I check a new ser­vice I try to under­stand how it can be made bet­ter or how it can evolve in time.

Related posts:

1. Want an account? Join for FREE
2. links for 2006-​11-​22
3. Con­sumer behaviour