Twitter is the bubbles, not the bath

Fred Wilson asked on Twitter:

Q: what will be the first twitter post to get picked up on techmeme and who will post it?

I answered that Twitter was itself a conversation aggregator of sorts. Actually, I said:

Twitter is the bubbles, not the bath.

Fred is right in thinking that some Tweets will be newsworthy, especially in crisis situations, but for the most part, aggregating those conversations needs to happen in real-time, like with Track, a feature that allows you to follow keywords.

This results in affinity groups forming around keywords which represent concepts and memes.

If the aggregation isn’t in real-time for a service like Twitter, it has lost a lot of its steam.

TinyURL is dead. . .

It’s no big revelation that file-sharing is a popular online activity and the ways to do it are countless and evolving.

Email attachments, P2P services and vertical silos like YouTube rank among the heavy hitters.

Twitter users don’t have a built in way to share files. They generally put the media object somewhere on the web and point a TinyURL at it.

It has been suggested that we could embed metadata into the TinyURL. This metadata will tell a user the destination when they scroll over a link. Maybe we could also embed mime-types into the links to show us the fact that a link is to a video, photo or other media object.

Many folks, including Dave Winer, have worked to make the process of sharing media on Twitter more integrated. By creating third party services that sit on top of Twitter and its API, photo and other sharing has become more accessible.

A purist like Steve Gillmor might say this effort is unnecessary and the TinyURLs work just fine. On the other hand, Gillmor might point to LiveMesh, a Twitter-like service, but juiced up to handle not only our text-flows, but our media-flows as well. I’m sure Steve will tell me how I misinterpreted him on the next Newsgang call. ; )

Now, there is a lot of talk about XMPP being an important part of the “Social Network Backbone” and I couldn’t agree more.

Let me quote myself from October, 2005, the day this blog was created:

I no longer believe in the web. . .

So what do I believe in? Instant Messaging. Once we add social network and RSS features to IM applications, this will be the only platform we will ever need. At that point, we will emerged from the wormhole we are now traveling in.

I firmly believed we have almost arrived there with Twitter. The question remains how and where the ancillary features are implemented and/or integrated.

If you look up the archives of the Jabber/XMPP developer mailing lists you’ll see the conversation of in-band and out-of-band file-sharing has been a hot one for years.

File-sharing over IM already has legs, but as the IM protocols become more and more intertwined with our social graph we can expect that the “IM attachment” will become bigger than the inter-office email attachment. . .

Or will it just be a TinyURL?

P.S. Look at GMail to see how far ahead Google is integrating IM and filesharing.

GMail, the WEb OS client.

Interesting post by Arrington about the Google event where they announced GMail labs.

Arrington aks a great question, “What about third party developers?”

Steve Gillmor asks whether this is the beginning of a persoanlization play.

Of course this gets me thinking about Twitter.

But really it’s a much larger and important question that is in the background here.

Is GMail the client for all our social networking needs?

I’m willing to bet it will be.

Twitter is TechCrunch is the Blogosphere

Twitter seems to model TechCrunch:

Graph

and TechCrunch eerily seems to model the blogosphere as a whole:

Graph

Is this meaningful?

Newspapers need to redefine grocery lists

Some interesting discussion happening on Twitter and blogs about online grocery services.

One of the symbiotic relationships in the ‘old advertising’ world is that of the local newspaper and the local supermarket. I actually think newspapers shoulsd get involved in helping local merchants communicate with the local communities.

If you think about it, it’s just like being an A-list blogger for the local merchant community. As long as the voice is genuine it will work.

But you see, I’ve been building newspaper sites for almost ten years now and if I told my team that they should get involved with conversations about their readers grocery lists, they’d think I was nuts.

But it doesn’t sound crazy to me. I wonder if I am nuts.

Lance Ulanoff is a fool.

It’s amazing that a company would pay this guy to write.

It’s an old article. I just stumbled across it in a search.

I’m no fan of MySpace, but where does he get off criticizing what a site looks like when the one he is writing for looks like a circus itself.

What a fool. His musings about Twitter are ridiculous if only for the reason that he is pontificating on whether a service will be around five years from now. Who the hell knows?!!

I’ll bet PC magazine will be irrelevant before the name Twitter is, even if the company survives longer. What am I talking about, that’s probably true already.

Sulu.TV : Twitter Commands

I’ve been having so much fun with Twitter lately.

The latest is a service I created that I call the Sulu Virtual Terminal. If you follow the ‘sulu ‘user in Twitter, you can use it as command line to get the weather or search Yahoo, etc. I’m adding a new command every other day or so.

Not sure what Sulu stands for. Simple Userland Utility?

You can follow the progress over at http://sulu.tv

@locals day 4

Over the weekend I threw together @locals, a twitter app that creates groups based upon the location setting in your Twitter profile.
Just do a twitter reply to @locals.
Traffic has been slow at http://atlocals.com but it’s been well worth it to watch the posts from around the world.
Stowe Boyd came up with the idea of virtual locations like “Not LeWeb3″ and a few have followed suit.
This one is posting from “Hell.”
You’d think that group would be a little more active. (I was going to say hotter, but you would think I planned that joke)

@locals

A twitter app/aggrgator based on the location setting in your twitter profile. You can create groups based on your location, which can be anything. “Stamford, CT” , “themoon”. Whatever.

You just need to follow the twitter user ‘locals’ and post @locals and the site aggregates the posts.

Also, the RSS feed gives a nice link back so you can reply to the group, again by posting to @locals.

UPDATE: http://atlocals.com
Ad hoc groups with a location twist.

Twitter goes dowwwwn

Haven’t seem one of these pages since I was learning how to install PERL scripts in the nineties. ; )