Imagine a website that publishes everything that you do, every second of everyday. Imagine that your information to this website can be gathered via the phone, web, instant messaging or e-mail. This is the premise of Twitter.com, a social networking/web 2.0 (pick your own favourite jargon) web service. I’ve created an account and so far I have submitted 9 entries- 2 via SMS to a UK Orange number.
It is a pretty easy setup with very low barrier of entry for any company that intends to replicate the same model. All one needs is a web journal publishing engine that is integrated to a content database. It is also quite easy to build the engines to obtain information from web forms, IM, e-mails and SMSes.
I first read about Twitter in Wired Magazine (in fact there are 2 articles- one on the creator of Twitter, Evan Williams and one on the phenomenon) and forgot about the name all together. I recalled it was “Tweet” or something like that. Anyway, I stumbled on it again today when I was googling away at work to find ways to increase international SMS traffic.
For the uninitiated, Evan Williams is the kajillionaire who created and later sold Blogger to Google. Seeing that the barrier of entry is relatively low, what is the business model for Twitter anyway? What does it hope to achieve? Don’t get me wrong, I love the service- it’s fun and addictive at the same time. It serves critics to know that Williams was probably laughed at on the on-set when he created a website to publish peoples web logs about themselves. Now, he’s probably laughing all the way to the bank- or not. Why don’t we head down to his twitter to find out?