While it may not be seen as a traditional ‘business purpose’, please know that our agency is actively taking advantage of Twitter, as well as the Twittergram service that Dave and Alan have so graciously offered.

Together, they are allowing us to help people in Los Angeles and far beyond lead safer, healthier and more productive lives – and we welcome TechCrunch readers to help us think of ways to make it even better.

I offer a tip o’ the helmet to Dave, and *especially* Alan Levy, who has not only believed but actively supported one of our most promising web2.0 endeavors, which will hopefully soon be resurrected and taken to the next level.

In fact, our next BlogTalk Radio show will be exclusively to discuss suggestions for on-line offerings, and we dare people to help us dream big.

Respectfully Yours in Safety and Service,

Brian Humphrey
Firefighter/Specialist
Public Service Officer
Los Angeles Fire Department

It seems to me that we have seen this same ping server (coral reef .. hehe) architecture rollout/play/sell before. Same bartender and blender … just some slightly different ingredients.

First, no one can deny that Dave’s overall technical concept is a valid one. But in reality right now it is just technology that needs much help to get traction. Actually, right now there are more people talking and writing about “twittergrams” on the web then there are people actually posting twittergrams on the web. Step 1 accomplished!!

If his implementation rollout begins to stick, which I believe with some tweaking, marketing, uptake and valley help and luck could, watch how the Twitter technical connection/pinging becomes less important.

Dave’s new site could become the main or at least one of the main community ping servers of value in the audiogramosphere or better yet mediagramosphere.

This play is really not much different then his weblogs.com play. Get in early on the buildout of the core communication architecture and have other deep pocketed valley ventured developers build off of you. Every new venture that attaches to your service validates your implementation and adds value $$ to your property.

Like Twitter on the SMS text side, if some audio/video/media developers become interested in Twitter they will logically think they need to build out their media grammys from Dave’s new Twitter audiogram coral reef alias ping server.

Anything here sound familiar…

So what is the business purpose of and the reason somebody would buy twittergram.com in the future??

The same reason Verisign bought weblogs.com:

Michael Arrington – October 7th, 2005 at 3:01 pm

“Anjo,

Ping servers are critical for the proper working of blogs. They are the way that real time search engines like technorati, pubsub, icerocket, etc. know a blog has updated. Without ping servers, the search engines would have to index every blog every few minutes to keep content updated. With ping servers, the blog tells the search engines that it has updated, and the search engines can therefore only re index updated blogs.”

Michael Arrington -
October 7th, 2005 at 5:12 pm

“Randy, yeah, there are many ping servers today, but weblogs is the oldest and is built into everything. For instance, I only ping weblogs.com because I know that’s enough to get the word out to all ping servers.”

Seems so obvious from here. I wrote about this angle about two weeks ago in a post “Mr. Twitter meets Mr. Podcast” @ http://www.podc...com/blog/?p=325

Harold Gilchrist

I am pleased that Blogtalkradio was able to contribute to Dave’s cool Twittergram creation. I look forward to seeing where Dave wants to take this neat tool and we stand ready to help in any way we can.

Alan Levy
CEO BTR

I depreend from this that, in your opinion, money is the way to determine someone’s value, right? If Dave had done exactly the same things but not making any money along the way… people would underestimate him. Nice.