This blog comes out of a discussion from the Web 2.0 conference I had with several people in the audience while we were waiting for Dave Hornik to give us his words of wisdom about Viral Marketing. In addition, Dave also used Twitter as an example of viral marketing and collaboration.

Our definition for collaboration is "multiple interactions between two or more people for the transfer of complex information for some common goal over a specified period of time." If there is no goal or purpose for the interaction, then we call it "gossip." The question I am trying to answer in this blog is: "Is Twitter Collaboration or Gosssip?"

What is Twitter?

If you look it up on Wikipedia the definition is: Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (text-based
posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, the
Twitter website, or an application such as Twitterrific. Twitter was
founded in October 2006 by San Francisco start-up company Obvious
Corp.

[More:]

Who Uses It?

Some colleagues of mine have been using twitter extensively for the last few months and can confirm some degree of utility. Twitter is labeled "invaluable" or "inane", depending on who you talk to.

The core of the value proposition is that you broadcast status through IM or SMS to self-selected subscribers: subscribers receive the messages either online or via SMS. As a subscriber you listen to a person (rather than to an interest), so any topic that person transmits is what you receive (note: it is best if those you Twitter with have some of the same interests or goals).

A technologist group that a colleague peers with used Twitter intensely for a while, but have recently largely abandoned it. Problems included both mixed-intention, leading to a mix of messages such as "walked into XYZ bar - if you are in the area, come join us." But unfortuately many of the messages on Twitter are time sensitive, but the messages were often delivered too late, often a couple of hours after they were sent, and not immideatley (like IM is supposed to be). This may be a fault of the Teleco's that have the supporting (SMS) infrastructure, but it makes the value of something like Twitter a lot less.

Within pockets of users, you'd tend to get a certain type of usage, but of course, what's considered legitimate use (signal) in one group is often considered (noise) in another.

As a business model, I can't see it lasting. Every text message sent by a user is duplicated and sent to each of their subscribers in your Twitter network (this is great for the telecos if they are sent as SMS messages, as they can charge for these). Let's assume that you have 50 people in your Twitter network and send at least 2 messages a day.

Strange Math

As far as I can determine there is no business model yet for Twitter. There is no income ( e.g. no ads) but Twitter is sinking the costs for these messages themselves. How can this be sustained? Consider one person sending two messages per week (and many send 3 or more per day). The math is something like this: 2 x 50 messages = 100 messages/day. If Twitter has over 40,000 users, that is 4 million messages each day. If they are charged even $0.01 per message, our guess is that they are spending $40,000 burn rate per week. Tough for any start-up, no matter how well funded they are. So probably our math is wrong in some way, in that we do not know about some deal that Twitter may have around sending SMS messages.

Twitter for Geeks

For users, Twitter offers a very narrow tranche of collaborative functionality, but leaves users with manually integrating to reconcile their lives across multiple systems (often users have more than one IM system). While technologists (read geeks) can handle this type of integration, normal users usually can't, (or don't want to!), and often end up using services like Gaim (which has been re-named to Pidgin) or Trillian to do user-side integration of IM. Maybe Twitter should get themselves integrated with these two services?

Twitter your Teen Angst

Having felt the same way about MySpace and the amount of teen angst that people were writing about on there, I suspect that Twitter is just a more real-time way to share this angst with your (virtual) peer group. I suspect twitter will wither as a competing solution to integrated offerings such as Facebook, for example, has just implemented a twitter-style functionality.

A Better Model

This not only saves the user time and the ability to learn another system, but has an incredible penetration rate across North America (meaning many more people are already using it) and extends and embraces the SMS interface and exposes Facebook functionality to mobile users (a rapidly growing population). In addition, Facebook does have a business model (although I do not think they are worth $6 billion, as their founder claims).

All in all, integrated services like Twitter save time and can decrease the complexity of communications and interactions over disparate systems. In the case of Twitter, this means that more people will use it and will reach a critical mass first. Twitter is an interesting case on Viral Marketing, as to my knowledge, they have not spent any $ on advertizing or marketing and it has reached 40,000+ users in just a few months through contact (like a virus would).

For a user, if getting your message out matters, you'll probably prefer to send it through Facebook, with a more solid business model and infrastructure than to spend the money and effort on an outbound message through Twitter. However, for us older folks, we should take note of how these younger users (generation Z?) use these technologies to communicate with each other. They not only use it to communicate content (which the Boomers and Gen X and Y do) but they use these technologies to communicate emotion, location, criticality and even as a way to share code quickly or for a bug fix.

Personally, I don't want someone to know where I am or what I am doing every minute of every day. I am all for Web 2.0 values and transparency, but Twitter moves it from the sublime to the rediculous!