Space, Time And Twitter: Are There Plant Twitters?

Wyclef Jean via last.fm

Imagine a newspaper or a TV station that has a bureau in every town on earth, in every capital city. Can you imagine one step further? Imagine a newspaper or network that has someone covering every human being. That is what Twitter is. And Twitter is not a newspaper or a network. Evan Williams is not my Editor In Chief. I don't report to the dude, cool as he is. I don't even report to the world. I don't report to me. It is not important to say out loud who if anyone I report to. But my thought fragments matter. They are fundamental to the social fabric of the world. I matter if or not I want to participate in the jamboree. To twitter is to say you don't need to get on TV, you don't need a microphone, you don't need a gathered audience, you don't

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need a special day, or a special moment. Every moment is special if you think it is. That is Twitter.

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What Twitter captures is the basic building block of our social reality. A tweet is an atom. The social reality already existed. Even with old media and with mainstream media, the reality still existed, and the building block was still the atom, the tweet. But now, with Twitter, we get to map that social reality, one tweet at a time.

Twitter is about power to the people where power should have been all along. I wondered o

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ut loud once in the late 1990s as to why people talk of term limits for politicians but not for the talking heads on TV. Some of them stick around for decades. And they have power over opinions.

Democracy means the political power rests with the people. Social media - it should really be one word like democracy - means the media power rests with the people.

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Monetizing Twitter: A Few Ideas

There are many ways to monetize Twitter. I say scale it (Goal: A Billion People On Twitter), monetize it, and then go public. This is a company whose market value will be in the billions. But monetization is key.

(1) Twitter Enterprise

There could be several versions. Companies could pay for premier accounts. Of course they could opt to have free accounts just as well, like many small businesses might. But my idea of Twitter Enterprise sees similarities with Google AdWords. Companies small and big use AdWords.

The first order of business would be help companies make sense of the vast order of data that might accumulate on Twitter around their brand names, mostly real time and near real time, but also digging into the archives. What if I want a snapshot for the past week, the past month?

(2) Twitter Ad Stream

The second order of business would be displaying ads. Use the real estate. My Twitter profile page has space for ads I think. Each tweet has its own unique web address. And each such page is more real estate for ads. Maybe ads on Twitter should be limited to 70 characters. And ad streams would be handled by Twitter Corporate. Catchy text plus tiny URL.

Once you create the concept of the Twitter ad stream, you could put that out many places including in the live streams of individual account holders. If every 30th tweet in my stream is a 70 character, one line ad, so be it. The ads should look like ads.

Just like Facebook's ad space is different, (Facebook's Ad Space Is Different) Twitter's ad space is also different. It has to be to stand out.

(3) Tweet Ads

The concept has to be introduced. And it should perhaps be automated like AdWords. People and businesses sign up online, pay by credit card, design their 70 character tweet ads, and pick the kind of streams they would like to go down in. And of course the tweet ads can be retweeted.

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Stream 2.0: The Next Big Thing?

Image by

The Economist

via CrunchBase

Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter

You could argue FriendFeed is doing it, but maybe not. Hotmail had an Inbox. Gmail has an Inbox. Before Hotmail Outlook had an Inbox.

Twitter beat Facebook to the punch on the stream concept. Facebook has all the traffic, but Twitter has all the buzz.

The buzz moved from Microsoft to Google and Bill Gates offered to buy Google, "at any price." The buzz moved from Google to Facebook, and Google wanted to buy Facebook. Facebook wanted to buy Twitter.

"Is my credit good enough to buy you out?"



I came across UnHub when this TechCrunch article got emailed to me recently: UnHub Offers A Simple Way To Showcase The Online You. UnHub smells of possibilities, although the tough economy has many of us on the tizzy. It is a crack at the stream concept. Many took a crack at the Inbox. Many will take a crack at the Stream. Several will survive.



If you think about it, it is ridiculous that I have to go to this one place on the web to update my status. The stream should be able to zap up my status on its own from my many different online presences.

Evan Williams has talked recently of revolutionizing email. Perhaps the next level email will attempt a fusion, a fusion between the Inbox and the Stream.

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Superfast Cable Broadband And The Rest Of The Daily Soup

• A jump from the current 2 MB to 100 MB as early as next year is highly desirable. There is no way to go but up. Personally I would like to follow World Cup Soccer games online. For one, I don't own a television set. Two, I don't want to own a television set. There is this double whammy of speeds going up and the prices going down. Connectivity prices need to go the hardware and the software route: down, down, down. The competition sizzles up. There is DSL (1.5-3), cable (4-16) and fiber (30). When you cut prices, you gain market share, like DSL companies have shown; when you raise speeds, there is a similar effect. Municipalities geting into the fiber network business is another pop up. Why wait for the market to seep it in! This Louisiana victory goes against the current of other defeats where the big companies bullied the small and not so small towns.
  

• A 10 year old Pakistani is in news for getting Microsoft certified. She got to meet Bill Gates, an experience she describes as "second only to visiting Disneyland." Gates' got company and competition, both. Another curiosity: bike powered internet in Uganda. Wow.
  

• Like WiMax has been moving towards standardization and mainstreaming, so has broadband over powerlines.
  

• Rush Limbaugh and Al Franken are both podcasting. Looks like both have arrived. Podcasting needs to go video. So media pyramids come down like in tetris games. I personally am waiting for Evan Williams of the Blogger.com fame to release his Odeo. I am into audio but not podcasting yet. To tell you the truth, I prefer text, but audio and video components embellish the offering. Here are some more interesting talkers than Lim or Frank. And this Mark Cuban foray into blogosphere search.
  

• iPod for movies anyone? The need is sure there. That darling of a company Skype is off into video phones.
  

• With all this talk of text, audio and video, I keep thinking, why are not more of these people working harder on MathML?
  

• Looks like Amazon is already searching inside hundreds of thousands of books before Google.
  

• HTML to microformats. From computers talk to humans to computers talk to computers. This is on a Wharton site, by the way. XML, XHTML, RDF, iCalendar, vCard.

• Microsoft feels the jitters. Used to be Sun sued Microsoft. Now it is Microsoft is suing Google. Looks like Google has managed to create a more exciting work environment. It is an innovation at the corporate level, it is a group dynamics thing. In another industry, Citi also shed some.
  

• There is this news about China's 9% economic growth, apparently a slowdown. That reminds me. The Chinese leadership has been buying hundreds of billions of dollars in American debt, money that goes to pay for tax cuts for America's richest. Such a distortion. That money should be going to China's poor, into human capital and infrastructure and small business investments. Good reason why the Chinese should ditch their communist party monopoly on political power. These bigwigs there are on this big ego trip at the expense of doing good by their own people.
  

• That brings me to FDI, China and Taiwan. Apparently China gets most of its Foreign Direct Investment from Taiwan, but look at its saber rattling on Taiwan. Such a disjunk between economics and politics there too.
  

• China's insisting it will not float its currency. That is a high mark to currency stability. And a pointer to monetary unions. Currency fluctuations: what economic good are they?

• This article on the global economy paints a somber picture. Productivity growth might not lead to higher wages if there is not a total emphasis on continual education and training.