I read a very intriguing article this morning which I’ve posted below because of it’s relevance in our sphere. It talks about some of the things Twitter is doing to progress their product line. They are swiftly moving into avatars, which is what TaggAmigo is all about. The article is very enlightening. I think it’s worth a discussion the length of a book.

Today Techcrunch reported that Twitter will be releasing extensions to their API that will allow applications to receive private messages from users. Currently the API allows you to post messages, get a list of your friends and to query the public messages from you and your friends (ie. your default Twitter view). While the ability to query received private messages may seem trivial, this feature has massive implications for how Twitter can be used by developers and service providers.

With the API as it is today you can build a service that can take queries from your friends and responds accordingly. There are already a number of such services, but the problem is that these messages are all sent over the public channels that you and your friends can all see. With private messages, only the recipient can see the message. Currently to send a private message the format is d USERNAME message, for example: d cubrilovic hey!. With the current API, you can’t access these private messages, but with the upcoming addition of this functionality it will be possible to build services that use private messages for queries and responses.

With this new functionality we can expect to soon see a number of services similar to those you can find at other SMS services such as Mozes. Services like weather (d weather 94027), news (d news headlines), search (d google nik) and much more.

The advantage that Twitter has is that it is a generic communications platform with social networking components. It can be accessed with SMS, Instant Messaging, the website itself and a plethora of applications that have already been built to read/write to Twitter. For potential service providers, Twitter has a rapidly growing base of users who originally signed up as a way to communicate with ‘real’ friends. These users have already registered their email addresses (for email in/out), mobile phones (for SMS in/out) and IM handles (for read/write via IM).

There is also talk that the format for private messaging will change from using d USERNAME message to just @USERNAME message. With that change, Twitter users will be able to address any service using any number of methods. I had a number of ideas on how we can build a Twitter service that will allow users to query their Omnidrive data store, so I registered the Omnidrive user at Twitter (this is my personal Twitter). This lead me to realize that because of the way the API is being implemented, Twitter usernames have become effective keywords for services. So the above examples require the usernames ‘weather’, ‘news’ and ’search’ to be registered to the service provider. The ‘keywords’ that will be used for these services reside within the same namespace as the usernames of ordinary users.

Twitter is already has signs that it will become a blazing success, and the availability of services will play a part in the growth. That means that generic keyword usernames at Twitter will at some point in the very near future become very valuable. The other SMS services sell or auction the popular keywords, and at Twitter they are available for anybody to register on a first-come, first-serve basis. While Twitter may be experiencing solid growth, many keywords/usernames that will potentially become very popular have not yet been registered - and because of how easy it is to signup they are easy to acquire.

I strongly believe that Twitter have missed a great commercial opportunity by giving away keywords. They had an opportunity to reserve generic words and trademarks for use in commercial services, and they could have sold or auctioned these keywords which would have also provided a solid revenue model. But now it seems too late, as a number of services are already being built (I registered a number of file-related usernames for Omnidrive) and forward-thinking users have ’squatted’ on other potentially valuable keywords. I believe that within weeks or months we will see an after-market for the trading of Twitter usernames - as information and data providers rush to be the first to tap the base of Twitter users with their own services.

It seems that Twitter have every right to delete an account, but such a move is certain to cause controversy. With the growing popularity of Twitter, this raises a lot of questions (similar questions that are faced by domain name registrars) such as what to do in the case of trademark infringement and squatting etc. Twitter has already been suffering some scalability issues with a slow service, I wonder how it will fair now with what I can only expect will be a rush of hits on the signup page.