Twitter + FriendFeed feature = Welcome advertising, Killing FriendFeed
From the annoncement Twitter made on the developer mailing list hosted on Google Groups, Twitter’s got a new feature that may fundamentaly change user’s experience giving ability to connect status and replies like in forum threats. Which is in accordance with the recent moves they did, downscaling costs of Twitter use limiting to 2000 followers the max following users (and caping max following people proportionally to the user’s followers) and cutting SMS receiving for private messages. In accordance because that shows hints of a business model.
Now that feature’s on track, Twitter’s ready to generate specific topics from current chaotic conversation, adding to the “chat mode” (you join the conversation but don’t know what has been said before, like in a IRC chatroom) a “threat mode” (I look on what have been the latest created conversation) to connect with fans of the FriendFeed major feature. In that move we can see an attempt to catch up with user leak to FriendFeed and appeal people who don’t understand the use of Twitter (actually the company’s creating a bridge help people join the service). Moreover that would generate a new wave of application, powering up the Twitter eco-system, and helping the company find new ways to generate traffic, as they did by buying Summize instead of developing a search tool (and they’re quite smart if they did it on purpose).
But the major point is that they’re addressing advertisers a clear message: “soon we’d be able to aggregate conversations on which you can push content” (Business Week has discussed it here). Twitter may be aiming at creating killer application for media companies to push efficient advertising in conversations, and open the gate of instant messaging as Google Adsense did for search. That means they now need a semantic search tool to smartly distribute ads. And since they’ve given the ability to look at threated conversation, they’re upscaling web use of Twitter, making video ad possible. That would be an awesome move but I may be dreaming. Future would tell.
