To start with – right up front – I am a minor investor in Twitter. Minor. Which means I am hoping for its success, but it won’t change my life either way.

That said, I am definitely very interested in what it is and what it can be. From an “evolution of media” perspective, we’re looking at a huge change and transformation. The solidification of a new media form.

It’s easy to find all sorts of opinions on Twitter. Like all good hype, there are kool-aid drinkers, naysayers and everything in between. Heavyweights are all over the board.

It’s perfectly clear though – this crazy, simple thing has hit a chord.

With media history as a guide, let’s look at the forest and classify the trees… Then you can be the judge.

Evolution of Media as a guide…
I could go into how expressions of individual status are the obvious and expected extension of publishing… one that started with Gutenberg’s press, carried through personal pages, through to blogging and ends somewhere with full-text brain interfaces. (I hope not…) I may dig into that topic soon because that trend alone justifies something Twitter-like and can provide a projection into the future of what is next on the trajectory. Not today though.

I could also draw the parallel to one of the oldest forms of communication and commerce – the town square/bazaar. We’re currently on a track with Twitter that provides a pretty good parallel to that. It’s the place where cacophony prevails and every little aspect of human need for social interaction happens. News, communication, transactions, influence
and even education. Again, that’s another fruitful line to ponder and it can lead to some interesting conclusions about where business opportunities lie.

More significant, however, is that the combination of those in real-time creates a new medium. Not an extension of print or a trip through the online town square.

Declaring a new medium is a pretty bold statement. I stand behind it. Whether the ultimate victor is Twitter, another company or a vibrant set of purpose-built competitors (e.g yammer, etc), this more than any other social tool marks the beginning of a discontinuous, fundamentally different era of social behavior.

Why is Twitter so different?
1) Simplicity – At the heart of this new medium is a clearly-defined standard: short messages. Nothing more. Those messages can come from any computer or device, flow to anyone and everyone.
2) Fidelity - The 140 character limit forces a type of message clarity that drives contributors to terseness and high-content expressions.
3) Platformity (sic) – Twitter is conceived as an enabler. An infrastructure for messaging. In fact, I believe that there are few real applications on top of the platform. Everything we see in terms of apps today is pretty weak.
4) Scale – Twitter, moreso than the other competitive services, seems predestined to achieve scale due to media and opinion leader attention.

Is Twitter really different? Haven’t other services achieved the same things?

Yes, it’s different. And no, nobody has. Short messaging has existed for some time. In fact, CompuServe had a status capability long ago. Yes, CompuServe. Since then Facebook, AOL, Google messenger – everyone has had the capability, but it’s always been buried within another value proposition. SMS is the obvious older brother, but scale is limited because it is tied to a specific type of communication device and its not free.

The brilliance of Twitter is that it’s so damn basic and universally adaptable to all types of messages, modes of publishing and methods of retrieval.

Where to from here? What’s the opportunity with this new medium?

To understand the full impact, we need to start with the most fundamental building blocks of human social interaction: News, communication, commerce and information exchange.

News - Twitter represents the biggest breakthrough in news since newspapers moved online. Short messaging with a global audience has the ability, hands down, to be the fastest most consistent source of breaking stories. In a world
measured in minutes, this medium can publish in seconds, and does so every day. And, instead of thousands of beat reporters, there are millions of contributing Twitterers who can act as sensors for the world’s developments, providing more granularity and authenticity to occurrences. The challenge and opportunity in news is to bring in traditional techniques for verifying sources and establishing validity.
In addition to timeliness, there are two other factors in newsworthiness: Overall significance and Personal impact. Overall significance is assessed by rankings technology (twitter trends) or by traditional editors. Personal impact is where my
Friends Timeline comes in. News expressed by a friend is automatically personally relevant at least to some degree. Both have promise in terms of sorting out the overwhelming volume of message flow.

Communication – Two words: public conversations. Since its inception the web has lacked social referencing with respect to intrapersonal communication. Twitter messaging doesn’t replace email or IM. There are things that are best to
stay there. In fact, you should be very careful about the direct messaging features of any social site. Personal experience. There is, however a natural part of our humanness that wants to discern who is talking to whom and what they’re saying.
This is a huge part of our social concept in meat-world and has yet scratch our human itch in a big way online. It’s a big part of what Social Media is all about but we’ve lost our way in a world of widgets, wikkis and web-apps. There
remains a huge opportunity to exploit this shortcoming within apps on the Twitter platform. The apps today just aren’t able to filter and sort conversations yet. I expect the simplicity and single-purpose nature of this open messaging system to prevail over a closed system (e.g. AIM, Facebook) over time.

Commerce – For the last couple of years, I have listened to CMOs and brand marketers talk about “the Conversation” with their customers. Honestly, I have felt it to be well intentioned but WAY off the mark. Measuring positive brand affect in a survey is not a conversation. Talking to ten customers in a focus group is not a conversation. That’s way too abstract. Reaching out to a customer who has expressed frustration during an installation-gone-awry, that’s a conversation. Especially if it is done real-time with all, not just some customers. Helping a user determine the right broadband package, even if it’s not from your company. That’s a conversation. The opportunity is to help marketers find ways to reach customers and initiate those conversations. Real-time interaction with customers in a public conversation is an entirely new phenomena and new venue for marketing. This is an opportunity that has never been met by traditional company-oriented destination customer forums.

There is a danger. The norms for commercial presence are currently only emerging. Perceived violation can have negative effects. Keep that in mind. Please ask if you need help.

Information – This one is a little more vague today, but it is going to evolve over time. I have mentioned in previous posts, the exhaust of news and communication messages in these lifestream updates creates a corpus. For the non-search-tech folks, that means a set of knowledge to search against. Google builds an index of Web pages. Search.Twitter.com (formerly Summize) builds an index of expressed, casual information. En masse this has huge informational value, even after its flash of real-time value has faded. When did the buzz begin about the new iphone? What messages received the strongest positive response in the election? Does Imitrex work? What’s on the daily special today at Nobu and is it any good? These are questions that should be simple for this search and costly/impossible for other approaches to replicate at scale.

How does it all add up and why is that important to me?
It’s simple – regardless of immediate revenue plans, technology stability and leadership changes, Twitter has a shot at fundamentally transforming the nature of social interaction on all four dimensions. This has historically big potential.
-   The opportunity for entrepreneurs is to take the stubbed out platform of Twitter and create better and better apps
-   The opportunity for companies is to engage with your customers in a real conversation
-   The opportunity for the media is to refine Twitter as a tool for harvesting news and
opinion

image courtesy of a guy named Somefool(matthewm) via Flickr