Thinkernet: A New Series On The Twitter Ecosystem

I have signed up to contribute to Internet Evolutions ThinkerNet (they relaxed the thinking part especially for me), and rather than trying to boil the ocean, and attempt to describe everything that is happening, though, I thought I would explore one corner of the rapidly expanding Web, a corner I am increasingly finding myself working in: The Twitter Ecology.

You’d have to have been living in an ice cave in Antarctica to have missed the fooforaw about Twitter. A ‘microblogging’ service — supporting the publishing of 140 character messages from users to those that are ‘following’ them — Twitter has become the center of a rapidly expanding network of software companies that are capitalizing on Twitter’s open APIs and growing user base (now measured in the tens of millions) to create new and innovative tools. Ev Williams, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, recently estimates that there are over 11,000 announced or fielded application integrating with Twitter.

Some of these add-ons are clients, applications that run on PCs, phones, or via Web and intended to provide a better user experience than the native web UI provided by Twitter itself. Some are media-oriented services, that allow users to quickly publish photos, video, or audio through their Twitter stream. Other mine information streaming through the Twittosphere to be accessed in new and different ways, and still represent specialized communities that meet and mix within Twitter but need higher levels of support as well. And there are new and different sorts of apps being tied to Twitter that I haven’t even encountered yet.

Over the next weeks, I will be interviewing visionaries, entrepreneurs, and observers of this fledgling marketplace (pun intended), to try to triangulate on its direction and shape, and to try determine what sort of impact will this market have on the Web as a whole. To do so, I plan to interview a wide range of people, including John Borthwick, of Betaworks; Howard Lindzon, of StockTwits; Iain Dodswoth, of Tweetdeck; Chris Messina, the inventor of hashtags; and many, many others, including some that are less likely to buy into the dream of microstreaming’s promise.

No matter what else I hear in these interviews, I anticipate learning a great deal about how the leading Twitter entrepreneurs view the changing world, and what they are doing to lead that change, not to follow.