As I mentioned, I was at the Under the Radar Conference a few weeks back. At that time, it became obvious that Twitter is a phenomenom. The real question is, why?
Twitter is a simple app where you answer the question “what are you doing?”. It ends up being a log of your life tracked by the second. Now just because you can build something, doesn’t mean you should. I have certainly missed big ideas in the past (ie. I thought Excite was going to crush Google – hey, they had weather!). So I can be terribly wrong, but I am pretty confident that Twitter has no redeeming social value.
So, on my way home from the conference, I was talking with a Canadian buddy of mine and we began musing on how this app could in fact be useful. He had some really good ideas around Twitter automatically updating based on what you are actually doing (ie. surfing the web, listing to itunes, etc). Now that would be cool to see, but unlikely to show enough to get really interesting. I mean its great to know you are on the web (who isn’t), but I really want to see what you are seeing. A list of constantly changing links (kinda like open browser history) would be very cool and very scary at the same time. I know I’d turn that feature OFF (and so would you!)
Around the same time as I was trying to answer the Twitter question, another friend of mine, Rich Manalang was having a similar crisis. I would love to share his idea, but I think it might become something, so you’ll have to wait for the perpetual and eventual public beta.
In the meantime, look me up on Twitter!
