Twitter, for those who have not been introduced to it formally, is Web 2.0’s answer to AOL Instant Messanger. It is a public thought stream that aggregates answers to the question, “What are you doing?” For the Geek set it is the holy grail of social media. For the rest of the public, the reaction’s to Twitter range from ambivalence to downright disgust.

Lets take a brief look into Twitter’s future, and see one path its development might take.

Tweet, Tweet

Twitter

As of now, Twitter’s major concern has been getting a handle on its explosive growth. News coverage and word of mouth has caused this little song bird to go from a neat widget to a full blown business, complete with venture funding. The question becomes, how long can this level of growth be sustained and what will Twitter have to do to continue it? The answer, of course, is to get mainstream appeal.

No one cares. That should be the sounding cry of any company that stitches together a piece of software from an idea that the founders came up with over coffee. Even when you think that people do care, they don’t. If you were to ask ten average people what Twitter was, most of them would look at you funny and slowly back away. Now ask them what AIM is, see the difference? The problem is that Twitter doesn’t provide the type of value that your average consumer is interested in. Would you like to know what people care about?

Products that make their lives easier. The cell phone / AIM.

Products that entertain them mindlessly. Television / YouTube.

Products that are hard to come by. A Porsche.

Any great product should fit snugly into one or more of these categories, and it should ring true for the vast majority of people if it is designed to scale. If Twitter is ever going to escape the realm of Geeky toy, it will need to learn this lesson.

Maybe…

Twitter’s best bet is to go with a combination of option one and two. If I had more control over who I was sending my tweets to, then I would gain a lot more value from the application. Maybe if I could filter by language, or even filter by area it would give my communication more context. The reason that Twitter does not make my life any easier right now is that it a Discovery platform that gives me no options once I Discover what is interesting to me.

It would be like a cell phone that had no numbers. Of course I am able to communicate just as easily, but I don’t feel like my communication is as relevant as if I could more tightly control it.

Where does option two come in? The single most entertaining part of Twitter is watching conversations unfold. There should be a way to filter what you want to see for those whose only interest in the service is sitting back and watching human drama unfold. Of course, this would require that Twitter collect more descriptive information from its users, but the value they could provide would far outweigh the cost.

Web 2.0 Roundup

There is no clear answer to the Twitter problem, and it is not even clear that there is one as of yet. What I do know is that without tapping into the collective interest of the mainstream, Twitter’s growth will eventually halt. This might not be a problem if the plan was to tackle a specific niche, this is disastrous if the model that they choose is based around the idea of consistent growth.