Fred Wilson on Making Twitter Smarter, And More Valuable

Fred Wilson mentioned a real breakthrough in the use of Twitter — and by extension, other microstreaming applications. The guys at Stocktwits (see Twitter Is The New Bloomberg) have created a Firefox extension that makes ‘tickers’ — the acronyms associated with stocks — active links pointing to the corresponding pages at Stocktwits.

As Fred puts it, this makes Twitter smarter:

[from Making Twitter Smarter]

This gets me excited. Because someone could do so much more with this idea. We have a few companies that are trying to extract meaning out of content on the web.

[…]

What if they and others put out similar extensions? Then twitter would get smarter. The links that people send around on twitter are one of the best things about the service. It’s like a live collaborative RSS reader. But if every tweet had links in that were added semantically, then we’d really have something.

Yes, that would be great.

But this is a rickety approach: people don’t want to add a plugin for every possible use of links within Twitter, and not everyone uses Firefox. And many people get their tweets from a client on the desktop.

The real solution is for Twitter to add this functionality into the platform, and allow members of the ecosystem to collaborate around this metaphor. This opens a big door for Twitter’s business model, because those partners would be willing to pay for the links to lead people from the open discourse on Twitter to their websites, These ‘hot tags’ could be a huge source of value to the community, and a way to make serious money for Twitter.

Also note that the same mechanism could be used for benign sorts of advertising. For example, I could be live twittering a conference, and the hashtag could be sponsored by the event, and could point to the event’s website instead of to hashtags.org, or whatever.