Twitter – we all know it by now. If you’re not on the mobile social network train with the rest of us, go check out the site and come back when you’re done.
The concept is great – a push system to let you know what your friends are up to. It’s actually quite similar to how some of my friends use IM away messages. It’s just keeping track of your latest state. But Twitter takes it one step further and pushes the states to you when they change.
One problem for me is pushing these states through SMS. To me, friends’ states are not on the level of importance needed to make my phone go buzz and increment my message counter. Maybe this is because I’m not in my 20’s anymore and don’t put my social network at the top of my priority list. But just wait 20-somethings, you’ll get to this place too.
This issue is partially addressed by the new WAP app Twapper. Now you can check your friends’ Twitter states when you want to. But this still isn’t ideal.
What I want is a mobile widget – an always-on app that keeps these states fresh. So with one button (or just a glance if it’s on my home screen), I can see what’s going on in my circle. To me, this is the best blend of push and pull.
This isn’t an extremely novel idea. But let’s get to my second issue with Twitter – the fact that I have to set my state at all.
In the periodic thought cycles that go through my head during the day “check email, check RSS, work, rinse, repeat” and the interrupts that occur “IM, SMS, Voice”, I do not need to inject an “update my Twitter status” in there. No way. It’s just not that important.
What I want is automatic data gathering that I set access restrictions on.
- If I give Twitter access to my calendar, it knows to update my status from meetings I have scheduled.
- If I’m chatting on IM with someone, it can put that fact in my status.
- If I give it access to LBS on my phone, it knows to update my location. Couple this with an online map where you can mark places of interest with personal comments that trigger based on your location, and you have a seriously personal location-update system.
- If I take a picture with my mobile device, it will automatically push that out to my status.
Yes, this is kind of big-brotherish. But with the proper access control, it will automate much of these updates and give people a true representation of what you’re up to.
This feeds back into my initial problem of pushing SMSes for updates. It would never work with all this automated data gathering going on. But a widget would.
Imagine if you knew that every time you looked at this widget on your device, you would see your friends’ status, location, latest mobile picture, and what they’re up to (based on heir calendar and LBS commenting). Now you have a personal, non-annoying link to your social networks that’s accurate, rich with media and up to date. Couple this with IMS Presence, and you can integrate it into your phonebook.
So maybe a lot of this is a bit far-reaching. But technically it’s completely possible now. All I really want is more choice for status delivery methods, and some ways to get automation into updating my status. I think I’d actually use Twitter then.
Update: The Wall Stree Journal has an article on the whole Twitter [phenomenon / fad / addiction]. Great quote:
“Some haters have already come around, but to tell the truth, they do have a good point. Do you really need to know that I’m eating a tuna sandwich for lunch? Probably not, although I’ve had more than one person come over and join me for lunch because I told where I was hanging out.” As a concession, he has created a second Twitter account, called “SilentScoble,” where he limits his posts to five a day. A recent dispatch: “It’s hard to post less than five posts per day…”
… and one on the deluge of text message beeps the service drops on you:
“I probably started removing people the first week,” said Ryan Irelan, 31, a Web developer in Raleigh, N.C., who began using Twitter last year. “This constant dinging of updates,” he added, “it really just became totally overwhelming. I don’t see how anyone could get anything done.”
People are using this thing as a group chat application. All we need to do is change (or provide an option for) the presentation layer on mobile devices to something like I suggested above, and we can tone this thing down enough to have staying power for people with lives outside socializing.
3 Comments so far
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Have you tried Jaiku?
It nails;
“If I give Twitter access to my calendar, it knows to update my status from meetings I have scheduled.
If I’m chatting on IM with someone, it can put that fact in my status.”
I like the location based idea.
Comment by cisnky 03.17.07 @ 3:25 amOut of the two I think Jaiku is the better service. But Twitter is building the better community and for success I think the community comes first, technology second.
Comment by cisnky 03.23.07 @ 3:24 amLeave a comment
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