Tuesday, 7 April 2009
10 Twitter Future Trends
Twitter is a powerful and quickly evolving tool, that seems to have fully captured the attention of world media and online marketers. Changing significantly since its launch, it’s hard to predict exactly what might happen next, but here are some trends that might influence the way it develops in the future.
1) Shift from ‘tweeting’ to ‘searching’
As more and more users sign up to Twitter, the signal-to-noise ratio is dropping. Increasingly the only way users will be able to find useful information will be with Twitter’s search tool.
In an apparent realisation of this need to ‘filter’ Twitter content, the micro-blogging service has been developing and enhancing it’s search feature, bringing it to the main Twitter.com website where previously it was only available at www.search.twitter.com.
Over time this ‘search’ aspect of Twitter will gain prominence and where-as the user interaction with Twitter now starts with the creation of a ‘Tweet’, in the future a fat search box might replace the current status update form field as the intended first point of interaction with the site.
2) Twitter will menace Google
There have been many pretenders to the Google search throne, none have succeeded yet at knocking the Juggernaut off its perch. But Twitter offers something altogether new. The results we see in Twitter are human-filtered and almost real time. Instead of directly attacking Google head on with a copy-cat search tool, Twitter search offers an adjacent and often more compelling search experience.
With news, blog posts, blog comments and user generated content being constantly uploaded to the net, a search tool that focuses on sifting through this content and bringing users relevant and timely results has a lot of potential.
3) Three fundamental types of users will emerge – ‘Blabbers’, ‘Broadcasters’ and ‘Sifters’
Blabbers will continue to ‘bla bla bla’ about what they had for lunch etc, where as Sifters will dramatically cut the number of tweets they make as they start to use Twitter predominantly to check what the word on the ‘street’ is regarding major events, product launches and news items. Broadcasters will continue pumping out more Tweets, possibly loosing some followers along the way.
4) Automated tool use to increase
Many of the better quality tweets are links posted by users to interesting articles, however with tools like TwitterFeed posting these articles oneself is becoming redundant. You can keep you twitter followers up-to-date with your latest blog posts or industry news automatically. This, in addition to other automated twitter messages, will reduce the amount of time Twitter users (especially ‘Broadcasters’) will have to spend genuinely interacting with their follower (we can already see this happening with Ghost twitters employed by various celebs and online big-shots).
5) Twitter the Citizen Journalist news powerhouse
One of the fastest, most comprehensive, and most accurate sources of breaking news recently has been twitter. It has proved itself consistently as an excellent news source. Not only do all the major international news outlets and publishers reference their latest items on twitter, Citizen Journalism has been given a tremendous boost from Twitter.
Accounts from Twitter users caught up in plane crashes, terror attacks and natural disasters have revolutionised the way we are made aware of international events, dissolving the typical distance and lack of emotion epitomised by conventional newscasts.
How twitter will take advantage of this will be interesting, it’s a great case of technology evolving in ways perhaps not predicted by its creators.
6) Twitter ‘gated communities’
Thanks to intensive media attention, huge amounts of new users have been pouring into Twitter. Anecdotally, it seems the general sentiment among the original generation of Twitter users is that twitter has lost it’s cozy, small-town vibe. This might lead Twitter to enable users to establish ‘gated communities’.
Just as some users now can secure their updates, it would be possible for Twitter to develop functionality that would enable a group of Twitter users to set up a community of Twitterers that require registration to access their collective updates.
This massive influx of Twitter users and reduction of quality content might also lead other companies to develop niche-based Twitter clones. Technologically this would be relatively straight forward. In fact some sites like LinkedIn would probably be very well places to launch a service along these lines considering they have already established a relatively transparent and authentic network of users.
7) Twitter will fracture
As mentioned above, Twitter has the potential to be used in various different ways. This presents a wide range of challenging strategic options for the company’s future development. It’s feasible that Twitter could fracture out into various sub-services, e.g Search and News.
This isn’t that surprising when we look at Twitter from the point of view as a channel not a service/product in and of itself. Many objectives, services can be delivered via the Twitter protocol.
This strength of Twitter, is also a vulnerability. Other online sites can quite easily replicate the ‘micro-blogging’ functionality of the site. Recently, Google Reader’s addition of comments has highlighted this.
8) Powered by Twitter
The number of Twitter tools and add-ons is huge and growing almost exponentially. We will most likely see more and more prominent companies developing and deploying Twitter powered websites and online services in the future. Microsoft’s ExecTweets is a great example of this.
9) Twitter Pro
There have been many rumours about a Twitter Pro account, the likely features of which remain elusive, but it’s certain that issues like security, automation, better user/follower interaction and Twitter activity statistics will be high on the list.
Creating a pro class of users might limit opportunities for amateur Twitter users to build larger followings, with users of the future perceiving ‘pro’ users as more reliable sources of content. This is comparable to Google’s trend in recent years to up-weight content from better established brands.
Creating a Twitter pro user group will also provide a robust business model will also allow it to expand and develop its infrastructure hopefully limiting the intermittent but annoying downtime it currently suffers from.
10) Beyond 140 Characters
It’s possible that Twitter might break this key element of its DNA, the 140 character limit on user updates. If we look at services like Twitpic as well as the amount of videos that users currently link to, it might serve Twitter’s interest to start allowing the integration of these types of content directly into Twitter. This could potentially open up opportunities to compete with Flickr and Youtube.
Twitter is really just a protocol as it currently stands. But it’s a powerful one. If searching text strings of 140 characters in near real-time is interesting, accessing video/photo and even map location (think google maps) could be even more interesting. Just as Google expanded from search to a stable of complimentary products, there could be scope for Twitter to leverage their ‘social engine’ to create a range of complimentary online services. I know a lot of people that would find the idea of an online email tool with a 140 character limit very appealing!
Ok, so these are so there you have it, 10 potential future trends for the world’s favourite micro-blogging tool. If you have any ideas or feedback (maybe I’ve completely lost the plot with my predictions) please hit me up on Twitter you’ll find me @Kazimor.
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