If Twitter wants to make money, it needs to do to others what they’ve been trying to do to Twitter. That is, extend its lead in market share by solving the problem of cross-platform micromessaging. With activity streams from Facebook, Microsoft, MySpace, FriendFeed, and a score of smaller players flowing over RSS, XMPP, and HTTP Push, Twitter can consolidate its power by cloning the best of its competitors’ offerings.
Key to this jujitsu is the understanding of what constitutes a micromessage. Though Twitter’s competitors for the most part frame the issue as one of interoperability, in fact Twitter is in the unique position to define the platform on its own terms. If Twitter provides tools that allow users to integrate their messages, social graph, and discovery mechanisms with all other systems, Twitter in effect becomes the Post Office of the new messaging paradigm.
FriendFeed has done an exceptional job in the last few months modeling this strategy, and soon will reach a tipping point where it will be worth assembling a near replica of the high value parts of a Twitter Follow and discovery cloud. Already you can use the Imaginary Friends functionality to aggregate “friends” from multiple services, and create a Friends List and associated realtime feed to simulate much of the Twitter UI. But Twitter’s embargo of realtime Track data keeps other services from exploiting the Twitter user base as an organic messaging cloud akin to Google’s search cloud.
