Twitter as an Innovation Engine

On the heels of the very insightful and brilliant Time magazine essay written by Steven B Johnson How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live, it has become evident that Twitter is ushering an unprecedented wave of innovation, not seen since the early days of the Internet. The more Twitter is written about by mainstream media, the better it is for Twitter. This Time article reminded me of another seminal piece in the Economist back in 1995 when they characterized the Internet’s impact perhaps not a big as the automobile’s invention, but certainly more important than the printing press or the telegraph.

We’re seeing an amazing number and stunning variety of applications being built on top of Twitter, all of which are leaving Twitter’s shortcomings in the dust. Day after day, we hear of a new theme, new business, new sector, new country, new person, new organization, anything about anything- being moved to, created or re-created on Twitter.

The Internet is being re-configured, re-wired, and re-spun. And we, as users are re-learning it, in large due to Twitter, not Facebook. Browsing websites or having vibrant followers on Facebook will still get you very far, but knowing which Twitter apps to juggle will definitely give you an edge.

Having been part of the early Internet days (reference my book Opening Digital Markets, 1996), I’m seeing that we’re asking the same questions about Twitter as we did about the Internet during 1996 and 1997. What is our Twitter strategy? How do we manage our brand on the Twitter? How do we make money on Twitter? However, today the answers are different. And as with the Internet, the big break came when e-business was seen as the killer app of the Internet and big business started to take to it. With Twitter, it’s probably the social effect that was a turning point, but we still don’t know if something more powerful might supercede it.

And to the critics that ask what does Twitter want to be when it grows-up, the answer is whatever it wants to be. In 1996, I said that the Internet had five multiple identities: it’s a network, a medium, a market, a transaction platform and an applications development platform. And further, organizations had to master all of them in order to realize the synergistic effect of the combined benefits. The same applies to Twitter today. Twitter is all of the above, plus perhaps a bit more.

There is no doubt in my mind that the greatest and most useful applications and Twitter-aha moments are not going to come from Twitter. We should stop expecting anything more from Twitter than to run the Twitter infrastructure. Period.

Look at some of the most basic apps underlying Twitter. The more you gravitate towards them, the further away you are from Twitter. You start to forget it’s Twitter, because Twitter is doing its job.

1) Real-time search is already in the hands of a dozen choices, e.g. twazzup, Bit.ly search, OneRiot, Topsy
2) App directories are blossoming, e.g. WeFollow, twtBiz
3) Twitter desktops are flourishing, e.g. TweeDeck, Seesmic
4) Twitter browsing experiences are improving, e.g. TweetLinx, Tweetree
5) New apps that weren’t possible before, e.g. twtBizCard, Twendz

So, Twitter should remain as a utility, but a damn important one. They are the hydro’s and the telco’s when telco’s used to be cash cows.

And how does Twitter make money? They can start charging for their API’s to those that are building the best apps which use this data. Doing so will weed out the stupid apps that aren’t useful or valuable. The trick is when to start doing that. Too early, and it will stifle innovation. And done broadly, it will paint the good with the bad. I’m an advocate of a certain Twitter app maturity scale of sort. Those apps that are maturing and providing value to their end-users should be taxed by Twitter. Those are still emerging and carving their niches should be given a longer reign to continue on that path.

Twitter is the tail that stopped wagging the dog. Now, it’s the dog itself.

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