I had a discussion yesterday with my friend Michael about the future of twitter and their potential positioning. It’s funny that it was relayed this morning in a Techcrunch article.
Why would I bother?
First of all, I’m not a twitter fan. I use it personally, and so far I’ve been using it as a communication tool. I do it because I want to stay on top, and reach an audience that is beyond (besides?) my personal audience.
But all of my friends are on Facebook, and all of them update their Facebook Status. Even when they use Twitter more than their Facebook status, they update their Facebook Status via Twitter (like @ceonyc, @cyrillamblard, @danielito, …).
And finally, until now, nothing has been easier to follow a conversation than Facebook: you can comment it, you’re notified when someone answers, you see a clear thread of conversations.
I don’t see how this specific usage of Twitter, even now that it reached a critical mass, could make it a search engine. How can “@so-and-so Yes man, you rock, loved that article but @thingamajig sucked last night” constitute the raw data for a search engine?
But …
But I also use Twitter for CabEasy. CabEasy allows taxi users to share cab rides, and each time they create a cab ride, they can tweet it. In addition, I’ve been using twitter to “source” the market and contact people who were looking to share a cab ride … with twitter. When I started doing that, I realized the value of this data mining (Summize at the time).
Actually, traffic is not free and to get some on CabEasy.com I have to pay. If I had a CPL (cost per lead) of $1, whether it’s through affiliation partnerships, advertising on Google or Facebook, or automatic responses on Twitter, I would be ready to pay to use twitter’s service if it brings me (i.e. CabEasy) qualified traffic. That’s where I think twitter could go. And they just might.
There’s been a lot of ink on what Twitter should do, and I’m not gonna add to it. This is just a reaction - and my 2 cents - on TechCrunch’s article.
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