Nokia N810 Giveaway
Nokia N810 Photo used with attribution from KhE 龙’s photostream’s abiding by Creative Commons
Update:
Well, I’m under the amount of followers that I said I would reach before I announced this contest, but I’m doing this because I don’t want to perceived as bribing followers.
Next time, I won’t tie this event to how many followers I have, as it’s raised some eyebrows, and I don’t want to come off as trying to game people to follow me.
I’ll never do it that way again, so sorry (I’ve apologized in public), if I came across this way. I honestly want to give back.
Ok, now that my intentions are known, on to the giveaway.
This is a hidden page on my site, it doesn’t appear on my main feed, and you’re probably seeing this from my Tweet.
I’m giving away a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, which I’ve been reviewing from Nokia. As an analyst I’m expected to review not just social computing web products, but also input and output devices as they impact the experience. To be objective, I don’t keep any of the products that I’m reviewing, instead, if I like it enough, I’m willing to buy it with my own money after giving it away, more details here.
Here’s my honest review of the product…
Nokia N810 Review: Powerful wifi tablet has promises, but leaves me yearning for next generation
Here’s my review on the Nokia N810, it’s a useful mobile supplement, meaning it’s a great product for the living room, such as a small internet radio or output device on planes, or for use at tech conferences that are wifi enabled. I found the keyboard keys easier to use than any mobile device, yet would still opt for a laptop. It doesn’t tie to any cell networks (it’s not a phone) but if you’re connected to a wifi network you can dial with the onboard skype application. For a device focused on social media market, there were a few issues with the browser, for example, it would not render the twitter reply page (just code) an some flash applications didn’t behave, as there isn’t an easy way to right click or hover mouse (it comes with a small stylus). I suspect direct competition will come from the iPod touch, which is directly in the same market, and price range not too far off.All in all this device is really a transition device, I expect the next generation version to offer the functionality I would come to expect, and as result, I would never buy this device with my own money, as I’d save a few extra dollars and purchase a second laptop.
Giveaway Instructions
Now, I’m giving it away to one person, I’ll send the product to you charge on delivery, and I hold no liability for it. It’s in great condition, like new. It would be nice if you could take a picture with it, and I’ll embed it on this post.
I’ll be giving it away to who bests answers the following question: “24 months from now, where will Twitter be? What will Twitter look like, how will we use it differently than today?”
I’m looking for responses that are forward thinking –but you back up why you predict it will head this way. I’ve got my ideas, but it’ll be interesting to see how others react. And no, I’m not using this for any type of formal research, it’s just a way for me to reward a smart forward-thinker in my network rather than do a random survey.
I’ll cap the contest off at the first 25 real responses to preserve my sanity, I’ll choose the best answer and update this post announcing the winner. Thanks again for following me, hope this is a nice way of saying thanks for following me on Twitter.
Thank you again, for being part of my Twitter network, I’m grateful.
Announcing the Winner: Andrew Finkle
Evening: I’ve narrowed down 8 responses, all of the great to excellent, will narrow down by tomorrow.
Next Day: I filtered it down to just a few more, and really enjoyed the response from Andrew Finkle who suggests that Twitter will be more of a platform with mixed use. I’ve embedded his answer below and sent him a congratulatory email requesting his address.
Twitter will look more like an operating system in 2 years. The Majority of its users will not even have to go to twitter.com to use the service. Twitter will instead be the platform whereby others embed twitter functionality directly into their own applications. As a result, Twitter will be different things, to different people.
For some, the twitter OS will allow them to join a social network on the fly. This might be based on the location of a tweet, the content of the tweet, the profile of the tweeter. Some Tweeters will not even be human, they will be anyone or anyTHING.
A Tweet will be whatever one wants it to be (not constrained by 140 characters of text)..A Tweet might be multimedia,voice,video,etc.
The truest value of Twitter will be how it allows one to broadcast whatever (voice,video,data), to whoever (followers,family,friends,readers (a better RSS), however (via browser,sms,email,etc)
Twitter will be one of the most valuable net properties (along with Firefox)…why? Because they are OPEN. They ARE the ecosystem.
58 Comments so far
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Greenpeace will have sued Twitter in order to save the whales
I think twitter is going to be hybridized. I have to think that the capabilities will grow with bandwidth expansion. And in doing so will open up to more of a console of not just comments, but video, games, television/trailers, etc. At that point sponsors will ebbed and flown and there will be some very useful tools that the core users will find indespensible… much like we see the cell phone these days.
Matt Garlock
Cleveland, Ohio
24 months from now, it’s very likely that Twitter will have been eclipsed by a better-run, more user friendly site. I have been using Twhirl for example, because Twitter doesn’t scroll or update on its own. This seems like a basic function. Twitter is an excellent idea but it seems the company may have bitten off more than it could chew, technology-wise.
Whoever continues the idea, whether it be Twitter or another company, will see participation from every major media entity, and greater participation with localized info such as weather, school closings, and greater detail with all information on the site. Maybe it will allow longer texts to fill up better screens on phones which we should expect in 24 months too.
Twitter will be a Google Knol application used to comment on posts.
Twitter will have rebuilt its infrastructure to be a scalable messaging system. It will have been purchased not by google or microsoft, but by Cisco or another hardware manufacturer.
Twitter.com itself will remain a consumer service, much like we see today, but the ecosystem of API/XMPP based applications will have flourished and many people will have trouble distinguishing twitter from email, as twitter will have taken over a lot of email traffic via plugins for email clients and servers.
In 24 months Twitter-like messaging will have made its way behind the firewall as well. News Feeds will be replacing dashboards on a huge scale and Twitter-sized messaging will be a big component of that.
In 24 months twitter will overcome it’s technical issues and will become the kleenex brand for microblogging. Pownce & Jaiku will succumb under the growing weight of twitter as microblogging moves beyond the early adoption phase. Microblogging itself will become more of a commodity function, in browsers and incorporated into any site with social aspirations.
I think there will be an Enterprise version of Twitter, that is available to be installed and maintained by a company’s IT team. The E-Tweets will have the ability to connect to public twitter, but the power of it will be reaching across the Enterprise (behind the firewall) for instant answers.
I can’t take complete credit for this idea. I did a presentation for several managers and directors on how our dept (Education) could use social media tools, and I demonstrated Twitter. I tweeted to other people at my company “How do you use social media @ work?) and almost instantly got several responses. My director wanted to if Twitter was available for inside the firewall. The ability to give a shout-out for a tech answer or to connect with folks who are working on the same project as you from a different direction would be invaluable.
We all know Twitter speeds that up outside the firewall, why not bring it inside?
Great idea, Jeremiah. I am as interested in everyone’s answers as I am in who wins!
I suspect that in 24 months, Twitter is going to be heavily group-based. It will be more of a combination listserv/feedreader in how people will use it. I will be able to add myself to a group (i.e., book lovers) and then tweet messages just to the group (I’m in a bookstore, should I buy this book?). Users will choose which groups’ updates they want to see and in what form — I might want to see my friends and booklovers group on my mobile, but my wine and social media groups only on my desktop. I will be able to read tweets by group, or threaded, or limited to a time period, or in any other way I choose.
I also think that there will be much more marketing noise, with incentives for joining and being active in specific groups.
Text messaging will largely be replaced by twitter use. My mom will be on twitter within 24 months (she’s 65 and just got her first blackberry).
I think that our language, already changing as a result of text messaging, will continue to evolve. I suspect that 140 characters will become a meme that crosses over into many other parts of our lives, including a conversation with the boss: “if you can’t explain your idea in 140 characters, I don’t want to hear it.”
Lastly, I suspect (hope) that twitter will be more stable, and it will possibly be bought out by one of the big guys.
Thanks for the opportunity to sound off!
Unfortunately for you and for this contest, twitter will look and feel very similarly to way it does today. Since it won’t reach mainstream audiences, the user base won’t explode like Facebook or MySpace. There will be a significant increase in users, but they will not all be in the Tech/Marketing/Ad/PR space. A few more ‘bleeding edgers’ will pick it up as a useful tool to keep in touch with friends and followers. It will be used to supplement blogs (as it does not) for those new bloggers.
Twitter will not fix its interface and will look largely the same. However, they will fix the infrastructure and spamming problems. The biggest change will be with the current user base. I believe many people will significantly reduce their ‘following’ to make the site much more of a conversation between friends, admirers and acquaintances. Twitter WILL do a much better job with accuracy of replies and even an option to view threaded conversations (thanks to the acquisition of Summize). While many users will prefer to have the longer conversations on FriendFeed, the value of the networks that have always been created may be too great to abandon altogether.
Within two years Twitter will become a digital nervous system for our planet. Following people from everywhere and getting to know about them through the mundane details of their lives will enable us to empathise with them at times of joy and adversity.
Twitter will look more like an operating system in 2 years. The Majority of its users will not even have to go to twitter.com to use the service. Twitter will instead be the platform whereby others embed twitter functionality directly into their own applications. As a result, Twitter will be different things, to different people.
For some, the twitter OS will allow them to join a social network on the fly. This might be based on the location of a tweet, the content of the tweet, the profile of the tweeter. Some Tweeters will not even be human, they will be anyone or anyTHING.
A Tweet will be whatever one wants it to be (not constrained by 140 characters of text)..A Tweet might be multimedia,voice,video,etc.
The truest value of Twitter will be how it allows one to broadcast whatever (voice,video,data), to whoever (followers,family,friends,readers (a better RSS), however (via browser,sms,email,etc)
Twitter will be one of the most valuable net properties (along with Firefox)…why? Because they are OPEN. They ARE the ecosystem.
I seriously think that Twitter is a powerhouse name and someone will see that. Most people answer the question “Do you know what Twitter is” with “I have heard of it”.
I would guess that either Microsoft or Google will take a bite at this company for the name. Twitter can sell on name alone for a large sum. Of course they would have to answer to investors, so this company needs to hit at least 40-50 million.
I believe that 24 months from now Twitter will either entertain sales options or be sold outright.
Twitter will be surrounded by other concurrent micro-blogging services which would probably offer more functionnalities. But we all stick to twitter because of his simplicity and because we are addicted to it from a long time.
Twitter will sell a private platform for companies who want to integrate it into their own intranet or network without relying to the Twitter infrastructure (giving part of their benefits to save the whales ? :-)).
Via their API, they will be more and more integrated into other platform and devices.
I think in 2 years Twitter will eventually become the de facto standard for small bursts of communication. It will become much more stable and user-friendly. It will overshadow IM significantly in that everyone will be using the same platform. I think they will introduce some sort of private “rooms”-type feature that will allow people to have smaller, more personal conversations with limited groups of people. No doubt that it will become much more powerful and significant that it already is, not to mention more mainstream.
Thought this was a brilliant and fun plan. I don’t certainly wish to be followed by a humongous number of persons but numbers aside, I’d probably be tweeting mostly the same concerns and interests as I do now.
Keep it up, Jeremiah. And be as you want to be, tweets, posts and all. Now that’s being free.
Best.
alain
Twitter will have voice recognition capabilities coupled with the web 3.0 that is being developed. Just short of reading thoughts this new platform will communicate and incorporate a mobile, voice only capable, blog platform consisting of snippets and sound bites. It will also convert by it’s own version of tiny URL.
Even 2 weeks ago i would have thought the future of twitter lies in event and location aware advertising, and while this is still a great possibility the events and twitter activity surrounding the Bangalore bombings set me thinking about the possible emergency response and disaster implications of the system. Being able to notify thousands of people instantly of events and provide real time updates for a fraction of the cost of sms. A twitter client on every desktop, laptop and cellphone creates a network of contributors and potential responders that can have a huge impact on emergency response. Take Chris Brogan tweeting a boston area amber alert. In 2 years this is going to have a much bigger audience and therefor much greater effectiveness.
This is what I’d like to see twitter evolve into
Jeremiah,
My guess is that in two years from now:
1. Twitter will have been acquired, thus it will be
2. Much more reliable and integrated with most other web platforms- think Google tie-in with Gmail, Google Talk, blogger, etc.
3. Twitter will also be used in more closed-group settings, especially for the communication between development teams spread out geographically, as it is much more monitorable/trackable than instant messaging.
4. Many bloggers will prefer microblogging to the standard article-esque post.
5. Of course, how could we have all this progress without… ADs, especially if Twitter is acquired. Twitter users will have targeted tweets sent to them, and hopefully caught by sophisticated filters they can control… phew.
Chris
Good or bad, I think Twitter will become consumed by one of the stumbling giants (read Microsoft) still trying to find their presence in the Online World.
A future view of twitter would probably see the app combined with some mobile & auto GPS applications, sharing tweets and location with your select group of friends, family and co-workers.
Gary Morgan
Laguna Niguel, CA.
twitter will have its own hardware (ala kindle), pretty much like the device you’re giving away (suggested name: the TWIT). a partnership with automobile manufacturers will see built-in TWITS in most BMWs and Mercedes sedans. the TWIT will be fitted with voice recording and output software that will enable audio tweeting and the paying of tweets you select and allow to be played in audio.
Whilst the TWIT will not replace the laptop, it’s a good device to have on hand when attending conferences and the speaker says nothing interesting.
Twitter will evolve into the global status update for the web. Users will log into their machines and opt to broadcast what they’re doing. They’ll also have the ability to select a mood (stressed, happy, moody, etc.). Based on what they are doing, and their mood, the Twitter API will be able to select the appropriately tagged music from their library, change their desktop wallpaper and browser skin and essentially provide customized and personalized ambiance based on their 140 character Tweet.
This will only happen if they are bought by Google btw
“24 months from now, where will Twitter be?
Playing Second Fiddle to Jaiku when Google fully integrates App Engine etc..
What will Twitter look like? - Fragmented still due to foundational issues
How will we use it differently than today?”
I could see it as simpler email system
Well frankly speaking if twitter will not be funded in 2 years it will fail and will be included in the dead pool.
But on the other side if it will be funded right I think in 2 years time it will have their advertisement on it.
or the company might have a share with the account holders advertisement.
Twitter will have lots of competitor that is why it will do something that can reward their user so that users will not go.
Twitter will also try to increase their database to avoid mal functioning.
I hope it satisfy your requirement it is just my opinion
In 24 months, Twitter would be evolve like RSS and incorporate both search, rankings, incorporated into existing social bookmarking sites plus metrics for tweet keywords and submitted links. The dashboard will look more like a full monitoring system that would also include another column for group tweets.
And it still is running on rails.
…alain
Twitter will be great, we all know that, but in what direction?
I don’t believe that Twitter will be based around anything other than short messages, as that will destroy the ethos of Twitter. However, it will fall victim to the commercialization (and monetizing) of the system (read closely in the FAQ for more).
I do however, believe that mashups in the future will allow it to expand in capability, a few of which we are seeing already. Twinkle’s Twitter geolocation service, the xBox live status, feed readers and more.
It will most likely be overrun by spam (I can receive 3 spam followers per day sometimes), and so will receive a Wikipedia-crosses-Apple-App-store style moderation. Users can flag accounts, but Twitter will always end up making the final decisions, based on the number of flags, for example. We’ve already seen the damage a anti-spam bot with administrative privileges can do.
Overall, it will not change its focus - 140-character updates, but the users that use it, and the developers that use the API, such as myself will. Twitter’ll morph into the cloud.
Twitter will continue to evolve, but will become much more localized and internationalized.
What? Huh? How can that happen.
Twitter users will tap more into their local environment with friends and local businesses. Twitter will replace SMS systems as phone companies charge more for texting, however smart phones will make it easier to use web based systems like Twitter to stay in contact. This will lead to more friend to friend contacts.
Local businesses will use Twitter to tell followers of upcoming events, sales, or what ever is going on. Businesses will continue to grow their mark on Twitter because it will be critical to their business strategy.
On the flip side, Twitter will become the new newswire for users around the world. The LA Earthquake was a PERFECT example of this. More information was passed on that one event much faster than any news service ever could. Twitter will tell people the quick pieces of news that they need and probably help finish off the print media as it moves faster and faster.
Also, video will get integrated more and more into the system either via short video files like 12seconds does or links to such files.
Smart phones like the iPhone and the Nokia N810 will speed all of this up, because Twitter will be in everyones’ pockets. Users will not have to sit down at their computers to tweet, they will be able to do it as they move.
It is going to be an interesting time.
I’m only accepting entries to the 25 comment mark, which is here. I’ll announce the winner later, once I get some breathing room.
You’re welcome to chime in below, but you won’t be considered for the giveaway, thanks for playing.
In 24 months, Twitter will still be ad free! But its popularity will explode. Twitter will have multiple branches - each person can have a “professional” and “personal” (or anything else) partition for their posts so that they can allow only certain folks to keep up with their personal tweets vs professional tweets. It will all be under one user name. Of course, my prediction can only be true if twitter is able to overcome its frequent technical difficulties and system overloads.
Great idea! Based on your review, though, I don’t want to apply myself quite that much. Doesn’t seem like a gadget I’d use since I have an easy-to-tote laptop, an HTC Touch, and a Canon Powershot Digital Elph. I wish I could access Pandora.com w/my phone, but pretty much I’m good.
I know a journalist who tweets trials directly from the courtroom & he uses his phone with an external keyboard because judges & attorneys are more comfortable with that than a full-blown laptop. While a tablet PC might be nice, I imagine that, like me, he’s doing fine with what he’s got so won’t direct resources toward another gadget.
Not that you asked but I figured I’d share. As for Twitter, I’m not sure it’ll be around in 24 months. Might be acquired or just replaced with a better app.
Hi Jeremy,
My forecast: in 24 months, Twitter will be snapped up by an Apple or a Google, and be put to use within a Mobile Operating System. In two years, I believe that almost all knowledge workers will have some version of a mobile computer, be it an iPhone or an Instinct, and Twitter seems best suited for this mobile environment rather than a PC (though at this point the difference between a PC and a mobile computer will be semantics). I think Twitter is just too unreliable as an independent entity. I know they are coming out with a new and improved version, but seeing the fail whale even once will be unacceptable as Twitter penetrates the consumer market. The Google website cannot go down, which is one of many reasons so many people use Gmail: the reliability. I don’t believe that Twitter is capable of creating this reliability on its own based on what I have seen so far.
24 months from now, twitter will be thought differently. Look: right now, twitter pushes updates to everyone’s flow, and that makes it heavy and unreliable. What about this idea: instead of pushing let’s imagine the other way: pulling.
In fact, twitter, IMHO, will be back to existant and proven technologies and ideas. it will use notions like OPML, RSS, trackbacks, and… well… Blogs! When you subscribe to someone, you actually subscribe to his feed of updates, so actually it’s up to you to pull down the update, and not up to a central system to push updates to you. Second thing: With this idea (pulling instead of pushing) one can say that the persons he follows are actually a list of feeds to which he is subscribed: thus an OPML.
What about replies? Easy: they’re trackbacks!
See what I mean? Twitter reinvented everything while proven ideas/technologies (which are really distributed, even more than identi.ca) exist and work just fine. So I bet that twitter will think things differently.
Now about the use of it. When twitter will become really distributed, we will wonder about one thing: Aren’t we blogging while we’re microblogging? I mean, twitter is not that essential to our lives, and we can easily setup out microblogs like we usually setup our blogs. So as a conclusion: twitter has to change, quicly! Right now. They have to imagine another set of concepts (try to look at what we already have) instead of tweeking hardware infrastructures.
That’s it, my humble opinion
12 months Twitter down time will be come a rare occurrence and Twitter will have evolved into its own first party air app that will now include rss allowing you to receive tweets from sources outside the Twitterverse. Expanded mobile integration will lead to Twitter coming as a standard app installed into smart phones. And the ability to place those that you follow into groups allowing for the creation of mini networks within Twitter. In 2 years Hollywood will have discovered Twitter and begin to use it as a way to market upcoming movies and television shows(allowing viewers to follow tweets by their favorite characters ). Reality shows like big brother and game show will probly see the most twitter usage.
After fixing it’s fail whale problems, integrating summize se, figuring out THEIR line between utility and community and taking a consistent stand, I see a possible growth direction that speaks to more user management and control over tweets and followers. 1)allow users to categorize and better manage their followers. 2)allow user to attach privacy levels to followers/groups & tweets (individual tweets could public or private. 3)better support of multi-account users.4)better int.w/rprtg. utils..Out of room!
Frankly, I think Twitter will be too spam-filled to be as useful as it is now, and everyone on the “bleeding edge” will be using something else. There will probably be a lot more corporate use and the “masses” may find it as familiar as Facebook is now.
I love the optimism of the previous 18 comments, but my forecast is bleaker:
In 24 months, Twitter will have acquired more users. Many of these users will be organizations, and there will be an increase in spam and depersonalization of the medium.
There will be a culture struggle between people who would like to use Twitter as a personal, human-to-human messaging system and corporate types who will attempt to twitter-cast/spam. The corporate types will be admonished and regulated (and blocked/unfollowed) by the original Twitter community, but they won’t give up easily.
Twitter will increasingly be used as a surveillance mechanism. People’s thoughts, likes, dislikes, activities and reads will become commodified. Marketers will improve their data mining techniques to use this information, employers will keep track of their employees, and governments will keep track of citizens.
I hope you are all right and I’m wrong. But for your predictions to come true, we need to think about what could go wrong and how we can protect ourselves against it.
Two years from now will see Twitter working without fail 24/7. There will be 100 million users worldwide, most of them consultants, marketers or PR pprofessionals. LinkedIn and other business networking sites will interface with Twitter, as will FaceBook and Yahoo sites (via Yahoo Open Strategy). Google will consider a purchase, but Digg will win it due to the tie-in with their tool which allows Diggs via Twitter.
I also predict you’ll keep getting a few more entries here still because, like me, a lot of people were busy typing their answers while others submitted their comments and got in the contest
Hey Jeremiah
Twitter will be bought by Google to give them more control over their vertical search and personalization strategy. Twitter’s best move was to invest in Summize. This specialized micro-blogging search platform gives Twitter a contextualized advertising environment to monetize the product and would give Google an add-on to their current general search facility: Google Twitter search. It currently sets it apart from its competitors such as plurk and identi.ca etc. Twitter will be used more and more for business networking and sharing information, back-channels at conferences and internal communications at companies as it starts to spread into the broader community.
It is still to reach its tipping point.
Cheers
Chris
24 months from now, Twitter will have found a sustainable business model or completely folded. Instead of becoming an ad-supported service, I see Twitter following a hybrid of a Craigslist or Six Apart revenue stream.
Business accounts (@comcastcares, @JetBlue, etc.) may be required to pay a fee to access the service. Personal accounts will have different access and subscription levels, limited either by number of Tweets, number of following/followers and perhaps even character count of each Tweet.
Provided Twitter can generate revenue outside of venture capital, the funds should be invested in strengthening the backbone architecture supporting the Twitter service. In a tiered subscription scenario, “fail whale” downtime could be distributed more heavily to the non-paying users and higher uptime guaranteed to those paying higher subscription fees.
As Twitter reaches even more mainstream adoption, there will be more “noise” to filter. We’ve seen these discussions pop up regularly on FriendFeed and other aggregation services. It will be up to the user to create filtering rules to decide what streams to follow and how actively to participate. Those users who cannot manage the volume of information available will stop using the service. Early adopters will move on to the next “latest and greatest” service available, either abandoning Twitter entirely or greatly scaling back participation in favor of new services.
I think Twitter will allow for more interaction. Right now, there’s no knowledge of who is currently online and no threads for conversations with “@s” involved. To create real conversation, Twitter will have to tell us who is onboard and how the conversation is moving. In addition to make it more real-time, the Twitter feed will have to refresh and look less flat.
Just my thoughts.
I think that in two years most social media sites will follow the path of integration that FriendFeed is now leading. By that I mean that cross-posting between sites will become more common, and social media sites will evolve even more to be aggregators of content from other sites. With that in mind, Twitter could offer the ability to auto-tweet when something is posted to another one of your sites.
Other natural evolutions of the platform could include posting location data when you tweet and developing a groups platform. It will also probably need to be monetized in some way over the next two years, which could mean targeted ads in your twitter feed or some level of premium service. The company may be acquired in this time, but I doubt that Google with jump on it - as they already own Jaiku. And yes, have faith that Twitter’s platform will become more stable. But don’t be too surprised if there are more bumps in the road, particularly when their traffic doubles again in a matter of months.
I don’t see Twitter changing all that much. I think that the developers are going to be spending a great deal of time working on fixing the issues it has now and responding to increases in traffic as it’s popularity grows. Someone has already figured out how to get people on their follow list without the user’s consent. The longer twitter is around, these types of problems will crop up and the developers will be busy with that.
There will be changes but mostly in how other desktop application developers create new ways to experience Twitter.
On a user level, There will probably be more people who pretty much only follow other users in their geographic location and the conversations will be centered around more local events/issues than national.
More companies will use twitter as they catch on to the power of social media some will get it right, others will just abuse it. In Columbus, there are several members of the local media involved in twitter and figuring out how best to use it to get feedback from their consumers. In the beginning, they used twitter as a platform to drive traffic to their web site, as several local twitter users took them to task about how they used twitter, the media responded and became part of the conversation.
Twitter will move from the community of early adopters on the national level to early adopters on a local level. The buzz will be different but there will still be a buzz. Most users won’t know who you or people like Dave Winer, Robert Scoble and others are and all of you will probably have moved on to the next big concept. Since I follow you, I’ll be there too, but I’ll also stick with Twitter to help influence our local folks.
I think that 24 months from now, twitter will be a standardized service, like text messaging or email, that will be accessible through many different applications. I think that twitter could become the basis of a larger communication network, involving groups, and the ability to spread ideas quickly, like an advanced forwarding service.
I always think about the future of automated appliances, or like the plants that twitter when they need water. If they could direct message you, or your other apps, services, or products that you use, all done in a private channel.
The ability to tie in location, a la twinkle, will allow people to share ideas locally, and temporarily, instead of adding people to a buddy list or following them temporarily.
Personally, I can easily think of serveral possibilities where Twitter will be in 24 months. Based on the current difficutlies that Twitter is currently experiencing in regards to infrastructure, it would appear that the company is undercapitalized. As they continue to gather more users and innovate new ways to communicate, this will make them an attractive acquisition, especially to Microsoft, as they continue to try to improve on their online presence.
Within 24 months, I think the interface will become much more Web2.0-like with flash or silverlight as the dominant code behind the scenes, as this will give it the appearance of a much more interactive communications. The interoperability of Twitter with other devices will continue to expand, think On-Star on your computer, handheld, and phone.
Twitter 24 months from now? Considering the model that Amazon had in its first few years of operation, I imagine it will be in a much better place than it is now. I foresee MySpace/Facebook like proportions of users and content, but without all the ugly profiles.
I see official integration with many devices from cell phones to even gaming consoles, and maybe even on devices that aren’t even on the market yet. Twitter itself is definitely a “think outside the box” kind of service, and I believe they will continue to push the envelope of social connectivity and usage. Maybe even eventually working out some of their database problems.
The challenge for twitter 2 years from now is the basic math of from any to any. Coupled with the growing interest by PR and Spammers, Twitter must find an elegant solution to present tweets.
The interface is key to it’s success so far and doesn’t need to change much. Threaded conversations are now a necessity due to the increasing volume. Groups are a possibility but not a necessity. Part of the joy of Twitter is the serendipity of finding people to follow.
Color coding for degrees of separation or frequency of interchange is a good solution. This would allow an intuitive understanding of the relative importance of a message without users needing to quantify each connection manually.
The majority of users will interface with Twitter via 3rd party apps and plugins for email clients.
Thanks,
Chris
Given their current scaling problems, it may well take that long to build a more robust system that doesn’t entice the Fail Whale to appear.
I’m assuming that the scalability issues will be fixed by ten and we will have no problems with @replies, track in IM, IM in general (my GTalk still doesn’t work with Twitter) etc.
This is going to be a challenge for them as more users come on aboard, more API requests come in from Twitter clients etc and the scalability issue gets bigger each time.
That said, what I would really like to see in terms of flexibility of use (assuming all of the above is fixed) is the ability to be able to send voice instructions to my Twitter account, thereby saving myself a lot of time. I currently use Jott a lot to send messages to self on my iPhone. It would be cool to be able to say “Twitter. @gcal metting with X on Y date from A to B time” or “Twitter. share this website Body text: whatever” and be able to do it quickly.
Currently, I have to dictate those sort of messages to self in Jott or write in my Moleskin and do them manually later, which is time consuming. I love automating simple tasks so having a voice input function direct in Twitter or a client such as Jott would be fabulous for GTD.
There again, in 24 months if Twitter doesn’t fix their scalability problems or runs out of VC funding, they may not be still here, in which case the above ideas would be moot and irrelevant!
Just my 2c worth: simple but effective ways of becoming more effiicient and using Twitter as an effective business rather than social media tool.
Twitter will start a revolution throughout the world. Business, Governemnt, all will use twitter to inform and entertain. There will no longer be any network news. All stories will go out on twitter as they happen. Government will poll the people while they are in session for input on important bills.
Apple will invent an implant to connect the human brain directly to twitter. Not only will this speed up communications, but Apple will find a way to use each human brain as temporary storage, basically a human internet.
Twenty-four months from now, Twitter will continue to be a social networking site. It will most likely expand into sub-communities of users, as we see already happening; however they are going unlabeled. For example, you seem to have a network of professionals (yet some are friends and possibly family?). These individuals, including yourself, will have the opportunity, or maybe will be forced upon signup, to identify with a certain section of the Twitter community at large and thus be “Categorized” and put into a Community of people. This will make finding people in your Community (or be it be know to them as interest area perhaps?) easier as well.
The other aspect of Twitter is also your friends and colleagues, which I understand has an intersection as mentioned above, and family, as was also just mentioned. This will also still thrive, but it will not be in the forefront to catering in “community type features” or “featurettes” (however, I doubt it will be the latter). This is pretty simple as I do not think they will limit who you are able to follow or -connect with.- Besides only being able to join communities, groups or “categories” of Twitter (depending on how they want to brand it) you will also be able to join a larger scale of people that have the same interest as you. This is the point of community sites. However, Twitter will brand it different and will have to take it to a higher scale. They will have the ability to use this intelligence of the community, what they are “twitting” and be able to connect the twits, in a mind map sort-of-way (I am not saying as an imaging mind-map, but think of this as a “behind the scenes, imaginary cloud…intelligence driven system) to intuitively, twittertively combine information and hopefully “spit out” useful information at the end of X amount of time for the community to use.
This would be ideal to the community, to Twitter, and quite an achievement in my opinion to the different knowledge communities involved. It would be quite an interactive, knowledge building exercise with the Twitter social groups at the center and forefront. I think the amount of communities people can join will be limited (5 maximum, hopefully).
The people that still want to use Twitter as only a social tool: sure that’s fine too. Where are you? What are you up to? What shoes did you buy? What shirt are you wearing? There is information to gather and mine and intelligence behind that as well (within groups) if you think about it just for a few minutes.
If you apply the same intelligence, as above, to such a community then you would have a very interesting system. Recommendations based on a group at the end of a month that is a Community titled “Skateboarding.” Obviously, these people would be using Twitter for their usual posts about skateboards (brand information, clothes, shoes, etc., etc.). Think about it. At the end of a term, Twitter could possibly gather information to use and sell to this community and the community would/could possibility appreciates it.
The value of Twitter is in its short post limits and the ability to keep it at this limit (even when sending messages). Hopefully they will stick to this methodology. I do not see them veering from this and if they do — they better have a damn good reason (or something groundbreaking will change on the web). Twitter will continue to keep up with a Simple U.I. design, as it does today, but it will advance in its ability to allow users to skin it (apply more and more themes), they will provide more abilities for its users to theme/skin it (”out of the box”), and allow users to use much more technology, obviously current standards based, such as CSS 2.0/3.0 [hopefully!] to overhaul their little place on Twitter. It will however always maintain the Twitter look-and-feel no matter where you are in the site and you will know that you are on Twitter.com.
They will also release an API that can integrate into blogs, web sites, corporate web sites, etc. Hopefully they will see the value in corporations and have a team dedicates to corporate environments and social media, within corporations and dealing with corporations, and be able to form a division or branch off of this. Social Media is definitely utilized a lot in terms of Corporate America (and will continue to be — specially since it is on the rise…majorly, according to analysts). If Twitter knows where the market is, they will open up their API or at least provide APIs to the public, start to invoke community-driven features and intelligence behind them for either marketing/sales purposes (obviously, very, very uniquely and quietly to the user…and not bombard them…only subtle hints), start a division aimed at corporations and organizations (with a tactical and strategic team to help those who want to bring Twitter and social media into their organization) with a special API for this as well that perhaps does not even connect to the main Twitter.com database of users and is a branch of its own.
Overall, I see the upcoming twenty-four months as a great time for Twitter. If Twitter is worth about $100 million today, it will easily be worth $280 million in twenty-four months. In the endgame, I believe Google will buy Twitter. However, I think it is up for grabs by Yahoo as well. I think Microsoft may be interested, but the fact that Twitter co-founder, Evan Williams, has sold Blogger to Google back in 2003 I think Google is my #1 pick and perhaps Yahoo is my #2 pick. It would be a big win for Yahoo, but I do not see Yahoo using it quite right or knowing how to use it as well as Google would…
In 24 months I see Twitter being bought out by someone, perhaps Google. We will see user base continue to grow and stability to finally stabilize under new management. We’ll see partnerships with big brands to cross-promote Twitter, and leverage the system as a way to market to it’s growing base.
On top of this newly stabilized infrastructure, we’ll see more and more developers coming forward with clients, more integration into existing services, and a wider acceptance of use in businesses and governments, just as we’ve seen IM gain acceptance there.
By this time, however, I think Twitter will have growing competition from open source, decentralized systems designed to resolve the stability problems that have plagued Twitter since day one, and give users a greater sense of ownership and control over their data. As this protocol is integrated into competing sites, Twitter will be forced to augment their service with support for the protocol.
In other words, I think Twitter will be a victim of it’s own success. They’re clearly unable to stabilize the system themselves, let alone expand it with new features; they’ll be bought out for their audience, and this ownership will give them the resources they need to fix their problems, but at the cost of innovation; unable to innovate under the watchful eyes of their new corporate ownership, much of the original team will leave. Those that stay will become little more than caretakers. As Twitter stands still, innovation in the open source arena will rise. Twitter will be forced to augment itself with these community achievements in order to stay relevant, and at the same time doing so will cause it to make itself obsolete. An open and decentralized messaging system is better for the people, and the people will flock to it when services being to see it’s worth and support it.
Twitter’s main issue in 24 months will depend on what they don in 12 months. Twitter has many possibilities for monetization but uses none. At this moment, it’s a hole people pour money in, hoping to one day see money flow out of it.
Twitter is, like all social media projects, dependant on the people using it. The more peopel use it, the more people flock to it. They are an information network that is expanding it’s reach constantly. But sooner or later, they will have to wonder about the money. Will it be ads? Special content delivery? It can be a myriad of things, but fact is that this will change twitter.
And that will be the challenge for twitter. How to keep the people on board and the numbers growing after they have succesfully monetized it and made profit from it.
Twitter is a new form of communication, a form of blogging where comments and interaction are the focus, not the original message. So it is a communication channel. Real succes means more people using twitter. And people bring in people. Twitter will probably start to have some A-list people use twitter for some exclusive stuff, so that if you read the blog, watch the ustream, you will also need to follow the twitter to know the whole story. This contest is a great example as only the select few (ahem) that read your twitter will find this page.
How can twitter be monetized? Imagine you can subscribe to a twitter managed twitter-er that tweets news stories from all major news agencies, based on your personal interest. That’s right, personalised news can make a comback. Imagine paying a small fee to follow some really awesome twitter-users. Ads on your twitter page. A premium twitter account you can get for a monthly fee that gives you extras and makes you stand out… It will involve the google system, namely to offer a basic service for free, get a huge audience, and offer premium for a fee that will be worth it because of the audience.
In 24 months, Twitter will have grown in users and evolved to a means of communication. For some information it will be the premium news source, mainly for stuff going on right now. And it will be a guide to stuff you might be interested in but that is hidden among millions of other pages on the internet.
Should we limit this to Twitter or the concept of microblogging?
First, I agree with other posters that microblogging applications will be refined and more tightly integrated as a standard application in mobile devices.
But 24 months from now, my hope is microblogging will have matured from it pithy posts and family/friends/associates updates to realizing its full potential — as a real time alert system for progressive city, safety agencies and companies like JetBlue who use it for timely, relevant updates.
By example of the recent L.A. earthquake, traditional landlines and cellphone networks quickly become overloaded. Limited text messages are data efficient for alerts that are relevant and meaningful just when the information is needed.
The above would take coordination and well-informed city/agency officials and corporate staffing, which is the long pole in the tent on this idea moving forward.
Finally I think it will move to more local and regional content areas as the population using using networked microblogging expands beyond the current Twitterati.
Twitter will become the stream of consciousness for the Internet.
Google will become the Google of SMS and messaging in that it will be the starting point for, and mother of, all conversations. The
conversations won’t be taking place on Twitter, they will move over to places like Friend Feed. As Twitter fixes their infrastructure problems they will become increasingly interoperable with other services, allowing everything to flow around them all the while keeping themselves at the center.
Mobile phone networks will gradually turn their SMS systems into twitter clients rather than being point to point messaging systems. Twitter will make deals with mobile phone companies to give them direct access to their XMPP gateway. This could potentially become a major revenue source for the company.
CMS and Blog software will gradually weave their commenting systems into twitter - so when you post a comment on a blog it will also post
to twitter. This will drive traffic to the conversations and to the blog posts.
Twitter will introduce new posting types. In addition to direct messages and replys there will be posts that can be sent to groups (a sub group of friends) and other types for making announcements (which will be used by news feeds and web sites feeding content into twitter. It will also be used by bloggers to make general announcements of new content.
Twitter will be like the hula hoop, eclipsed by the next great communication tool, which probably includes something like video and phones.
Twitter will be much more common, with many, many more people on it.
Legit advertisers will entice people to follow them by offering coupons, specials, and advance product announcements. TV and radio ads will commonly announce “Follow us on Twitter, for…”
Filtering by groups will be necessary (show me my co-workers’ tweets, or just tweets from local horse people) to manage the volume of incoming data.
News outlets and emergency services will adopt Twitter in droves, and people will subscribe to local feeds. LAFD is already on Twitter, as are several San Diego area news and traffic sources.
Small organizations (clubs, neighborhood associations, sports teams, etc.) will adopt Twitter as an easy, instantaneous way to stay in touch with their members.
People will refuse to buy cell phones/services that can’t use Twitter, because they would be left out of the loop with their friends and communities. (”Oh, sorry you didn’t hear about the party. It was awesome!”)
Presence and participation will be expected, like having a phone. If you’re not here, you’re missing in action.
Obviously, Twitter’s future depends on its ability to make money. I see this happening through its paid upgrades to Twitter Professional Packages: Business, Non-Profit and Govt.
When Twitter does finally identify its killer app for business, that is when Microsoft will try to step in and buy it. However, the ink from Twitter’s deal with Google will just be drying.
P.S. I like what chris demeyere said: The more people use it, the more people flock to it. Sounds like a Twitter slogan!
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