At the beginning of 2009, during a now-famous strategy meeting, Twitter’s executives asked themselves, “Are we building a new Internet?” At the crux of that question was the realization that Twitter “introduced a new form of communication to the world.” Public micro-messages are now everywhere—on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Bing, Yahoo, AIM. They are infiltrating every part of the Web, particularly as the backbone of realtime search.
Yes, status updates (which are a form of micro-message) existed before Twitter, but it is the growing public nature of these messages which makes them exciting. For one thing, they need to be public in order to be visible to search engines. But when Twitter and other companies talk about building a new Internet, they don’t mean that 140-character messages are going to replace web pages. Rather it is that these realtime streams are becoming the center of people’s attention on the Web, and sending them off in all different sorts of directions.
These streams are the new Internet not so much because of the micro-content which they contain, but because they are a more efficient means of communication. Remember, the Internet at its core is a communications system. The battle going on now between Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others is to control this new realtime layer of communications on the Internet. Each one wants to be driving the micro-message bus.
In computer terms, a message bus carries data between different parts of a computer or between different computers. Realtime streams can be thought of as a micro-message bus which carries information instantaneously between people. The power of a micro-message is its ability to carry data, usually in the form of a link. It is a vehicle for passing links and other information. The value of a Tweet or status update or a Yammer or a Wave is not only in what it conveys about the sender, but where it leads to.
Other kinds of data can take a ride on this micro-message bus as well. Geolocation data, photos and videos are among the most popular. Whoever is in the driver’s seat of this micro-message bus will be in an enviable position, which is why everyone is trying to clamor aboard in hopes of taking over the wheel.
Next week, at our Realtime Crunchup (tickets are still available), we’ll be examining how this new communications layer on the Internet is being built and who will be driving the bus. We hope you can join us.
Photo credit: Flickr/Jan Krutisch.
Pretty soon everything will be micro. Communication has gone 140 characters, now tangible technology will soon be getting smaller and smaller until we all have computers implanted in our brains.
Great. This will make people even dumber and lazier.
If Twitter is your entry point to the web which is your entry point to the world, does that put Twitter in some kind of a central position? Sure.
“Real Time” needs to have a space all of its own in a concentrated niche. It will be a mistake to draw the majority of the Internet experience to Real Time.
As with anything, an average online user cannot withstand the entire web experience in real time. The sheer volume of data will make the next to last update fleeting and less prone to archive and to that end, mostly unusable to the degree a search result would.
i love that the premise only benefits them. i’m guessing we aren’t going to be seeing a followup about twitter asking themselves whether they’re just another form of the same old thing.
Yeah , great , Twitter rock! , bla bla bla.
Just a simple question Erick..
Let’s assume there are 2 versions of Google ..
1- Google1 , a service that index web sites , news , blogs , etc (Current Google yes!)
2- Google2 which index these public messages from Twitter and Facebook (Facebook still hides the majority of it by default).
Which one you think people can’t leave without?
Google1 or Google2?
Twitter and all of this Micro-blogging thing is cool , nice , but its yet to provide a real value to ordinary people , and yet to be called “The Internet 2.0″
The first tweet I wrote was that Twitter was like “broadcast IM”.
I was thinking the same thing in regards to the IM comment.
Real-time, public communication is great and it certainly has it’s uses. However, I don’t see this being the end-all be-all of the future of communications online for very long.
With each new form of communication that we as a society invent (speech, written words, moveable type, recordings, radio, telephone, email, IM, micro-messaging, ) we still hold onto the pre-existing forms because they continue to meet a specific need. It’s like adding another tool to the toolbox.
Will email die? I doubt it. Will words written on paper die? Probably not. One thing seems certain though; the rate we are discovering new methods of communication is growing exponentially. Maybe Kurzweil is onto something after all.
Amazing! What was once thought as worthless is now an iconic piece of news media.
Not really that amazing. It is often the case in media where anything new is treated as worthless.
cool bus
my thoughts exactly!
True that sir(s)
In order to derive any value from Twitter (or their clone) I would need to first find people who send out decent links.
I don’t have time to follow a bunch of people in the hope that I’ll stumble across a few good ones that send out links that meet my interests or discover new things of value.
So how do I find those few that are worth paying attention to? And, why don’t they already blog?
Try us. And we already blog as well as Tweet.
To ride on the bus I think everyone’s going to need to bring a surfboard. Where everyone chooses to get their surfboard from is the real question.
(if you’re crytpically challenged I’m talking about Wave, duh!)
Nice post, Erik.
I don’t buy it. Being able to search through a vast number of short bursty status updates does provide an interesting view of the Internet, but this view does not define Internet. In fact, I would say the limitation of 140 characters of *text* is so ridiculously constraining that thinking about this as the next thing really puts us decades behind in terms of technological innovation. There have been great advances surrounding the semantic web, a concept that the data which is scattered around the web in multiple dimensions can be brought together in a meaningful way. The real challenge is bringing all this data together in a way that is meaningful *to the user*. That is the future. Talking about some ridiculous 140 char long status updates as the format that the world should adhere to is garbage. Twitter is really asking people to forget how they live their lives and conform to their rigid format.
In reality, people express themselves freely. Some will post a link, others will upload an image, song, or write a note. The idea that every piece of data I use to *really* express myself must be somehow meta-data supplemented using a Twitter message is just highly inefficient and redundant. It puts a burden on all the other people who don’t find Twitter as the right medium to really express themselves.
Here’s a practical example. I write an article for TechCrunch. I now have to both publish it on my blog and then tweet it on Twitter so that it would get picked up by the index. How can that be defined real internet in any meaningful way? Ideally, the minute the articule is written, the world should know about it. Now that is a dynamic “real index”.
So while Twitter adds a dimension to this semantic web, it does not define it. It would be nice to use some of these status updates and chats in combination with geolocation data and media bits, all nicely connected in a way that is meaningful *to me*, not twitter.
Past the chat and status updates, all you have with Twitter is meta data. This is far from the medium of where everything is moving to.
Totally agree on “metadata” – In terms of the business world, Twitter is basically a link aggregator – people post links to indepth interesting content that ISN’T on Twitter, but on blogs, websites etc. Normally it’s links back to a company’s own blog.
And there’s zero quality control with these links too – 99% of links on Twitter are out-and-out spam, automated tweets fired out whenever someone publishes a blog.
So to sum up: On the business end of Twitter, all it is is a place for spammers to dump automated tweets with links in them. These links are then churned over into the “tweetstream” of all the 3rd party Twitter sites who also aggregate links.
Net result: a pigshit midden of spam links, of no use to the average Twitter user.
But of course, TC writers never see the elephant in the room, they just keep writing about Twitter as if it’s actually relevant to the real business world. Next year: TC writes about the shock and horror of how Twitter failed, while we’ve been writing in the comments section of TC now for over a year about how irrelevant Twitter is.
I can’t help think the web would have richer content if all those who currently use Twitter would spend that time actually blogging and writing something more indepth.
I’m still yet to find a reall business use for “real-time”. Way too much spam because it’s “real-time” which makes search engines far better to find useful stuff as much of the chaff has been deindexed (I said much of, not all). So what if Google updates its index a few hours later – big deal because when I buy stuff I don’t care how that a site selling shoes has it’s “snippet” in Google updated a day ago or whatever.
Remember, people update their own websites in real-time!
Going to Twitter you realise how much spam is out there – how many naff marketers there are all spamming some worthless product they themselves don’t care about. And that’s inbetween the banal “me too” echo-chamber comments.
So yeah, Twitter – what a wonderful, rich experience with an abdundant number of business opportunities. /sarcasm.
Also remember that something is real-time only if the information they are interested in is presented in close to real-time. Who cares if the index contains up to date stock price? That would be one example of real time data in the index that does add much value to the “real experience”.
I think this will be a long and interesting ride. Figuring out how to mend real streams of non-structured, semi-structured and structured data in a view that is meaningful to the user.
Once the satisfaction of “real experience” is dominant, we will have achieved the real Internet. Twitter… it’s a friggin chat network. Facebook is a lot more in line with where we are moving to.
Yah but I can’t help but wonder if twitter will die away. Facebook actually ads some value to my life but I can’t say the same about twitter. I don’t care what people are doing 99% of the time.. you can’t say anything intelligent in 140 characters.. If twitter went away would it really affect your life? Does it really matter if you get info in real time or 2 hours later?
w.r.t. Realtime Crunchup are you guys going to organise something in London/europe anytime soon or is it all going to be in and around silicon valley? You do know that you have large following in europe?
Murtaza
“All Your Status Are Belong To Us” – http://bit.ly/4xgcyH covers my view on this topic and the importance of Twitter and micro-updates to businesses.
We’re only seeing the beginning of the influence of the emerging statusphere. Individual parts of it appear simplistic (thus some of the “I don’t buy it” comments above), but it’s the 3-way combo of the micro-updates together + follower/followed info + location-based info that makes it revolutionary.
Could we see more on Facebook, where people are having all types of conversations?
99% of Twitter is garbage. Show me the revenues that justify $1B valuation and then we can talk about Twitter being the next internet.
I know… honestly who actually give a dam what someone is doing 99% of the time… I think people are just caught up in it.. but evenchaully they will all stop and say who cares… and it will degrade into marketers… and people promoting themselves… and all those twitter apps will be useless..
Status: Reality is agreeing with Gebadia Smith.
God, isn’t it time for twitter to start dying yet? What a stupid service for annoying idiots who think people care about what they are doing ever second of the day.
I enjoyed reading this article. By looking at the comments for this article and other related articles, it is pretty obvious that opinion is still sharply polarized. Some think that Twitter and other such services are just a fad, the content on them is mostly useless. Others swear by them. One contribution I want to make to settle this polarization is to point everyone to TipTop, the only real-time semantic social search engine at http://FeelTipTop.com If after you do a couple of searches on that engine, you remain unconvinced about the value of Twitter, I would be both very surprised and disappointed.
I think the Twitter Executives need to deflate their hugely OTT ego’s just a tad, when quoting ‘are we building a new internet’.
Twitter is most definitely creating a hot new Service for the Internet, which could be even more successful if they pursued a more Media driven business model.
If done right and effective, Twitter could become the AP of the World Wide Web for Breaking News.
Majority of people I know still don’t get the fuss or the value that Twitter provides. I really like the micro-message bus, I think I need that in my life more than micro-messaging!!!