TWITTER – Its present and future
By Sharil Dewa

More and more individuals in Malaysia are getting hooked on Twitter. But what exactly is it and what is the future of this new internet phenomenon?

Twitter, in short, is a social networking and micro blogging service that allows you sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called “tweets” to your friends or followers.

The short format of the tweet is a defining characteristic of the service, allowing informal collaboration and quick information sharing that provides relief from writing emails and instant messages on MSN or Skype. Twittering is also a less gated method of communication, meaning that you can share information with people that you wouldn’t normally exchange emails or instant messages with, opening up your circle of contacts to an ever-growing community of like-minded people. You can send your messages using the Twitter website directly, as a single SMS alert or via a third-party application such as Twirl, Snitter or the Twitterfox add-on for Firefox. Your tweets are displayed on your profile page, on the home page of each of your followers and in the Twitter public timeline.

·         Twitter As the Platform for Conversation

There are many benefits provided by Twitter and what opportunities are available. The most amazing thing taking place from Twitter is the tracking of public conversation. This is quite transformational in the globally networked landscape. The fact that one can monitor all the discussion taking place about any given topic instantly is quite big.

While there is a value in being able to talk privately, the public conversation which was previously unheard can now be heard by hundreds of thousands if not millions of individuals. In terms of the ability to connect individuals, Twitter is extremely powerful for finding others with similar ideas. While we can debate the impact of constantly communicating with like-minded individuals, there is no doubt that the impact of this platform is big.

• Public Conversation Adds Immense Value

What many Twitter users have begun to realize following the initially personal user base is that a lot of value can be derived from quickly sharing information with other individuals. There is a conversational aspect as well as the ability to influence minds. One might think that as individuals we are only beginning to recognize the power of social technology.

It has become clear that social networks are still highly inefficient. That’s because it is still figured out how to use them. The same goes for Twitter but it is believed that one will see more integration with Twitter from external media sources. The future of interactive media is already here and among a small portion of the population that interaction is taking place on Twitter.

The company will need to continue expanding its reach including the integration with blog comments, and other forms of media. The more public conversation which is distributed through a centralized, searchable platform provides a lot of value. Once Twitter is assumed as that backbone it is believed that there are countless monetization options available.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone pronounced 2009 as the ‘year of revenue’ for Twitter, and suggested acquisitions would be the way forward for the company. As it stands, a search engine called Surmize – now known simply as ‘Twitter Search’ is the only company thus far acquired by Twitter.

Expanding the range of services offered by Twitter is a good way for the company to tap into more established business models – and the revenue these bring – without sacrificing the basic ...'tweeting' service. What this will mean for users is access to a range of services, much as Google users have access to Blogger, YouTube and Picasa.

Also, Twitter is a very good tool to stay up to date with worldwide news coverage. For example the last US presidential election had been monitored literally on a “per minute” basis by micro blogging. Studies even show that Twitter could help to raise interest in political issues for people that would usually show hardly or no interest at all in these issues.

• Twitter’s Buyout From Google

Google is making ‘real time search’ a major priority – and Twitter's recent (separate) deals with Google and Microsoft’s Bing... search engine to allow users’ tweets to display in search engine results prove that social media is becoming a priority in search.

With Twitter traffic down by 27% since September, and 90% of tweets coming from 10% of users – it looks like Twitter’s popularity going down?  Twitter may need to implement a viable business model or go the way of YouTube - have its popular but financially unviable service sheltered under Google’s vast infrastructure. If Twitter became part of Google, functionality in search and analytics would improve and create greater scope for social media marketing.

Twitter remains popular, but in 2010 it will need to expand its service to ensure a commercial future.