I’ll guess you already know Twitter (if not you can refer to Twitter for dummies). Initially, it is a social communication tool to answer the fundamental question: “What are you doing?”.  So you are not really convinced? I understand but there is actually a growing buzz about Twitter, its community and all the ecosystem or related tools. But let’s analyse the specifities of this new media.

A new media

When you read the homepage of Twitter.com, you may still wonder what so different about this communication tool. You can read more about “How Twitter was born“, but I’ll give here my vision of what is this media.

Let’s put it like that:  blog + instant messaging/sms + tribe = Twitter ! It sounds simple but the combination of personal content (blog) and immediate limited messaging (sms of 140 char max) into a social broadcasting platform is getting more and more attention. After early adopters, mainly geeks and tech people, PR and news agencies are now trying to get into the boat. Even advertisers are slowly offering solutions to monetize these 140 characters (here and there)!

So what’s really new in Twitter? It is a fresh, reactive and fast communication channel. It also have some “RSS like” aspect because you are pulling the updates from your friends. At least this is the first aspect, because with tools like Twhirl or TweetDeck, we are becoming more and more addicted to this IM based community. In such a way that you are no more pulling tweets when you want to read them, but you use this monitor/scanning application to always be aware of the last tweet of your virtual friend.

So in a few words, Twitter is a short broadcast messaging system. To me, it is a new mail system only you’re limited at 140 characters and forced to broadcast publicly your message. Hence, one may ask if Twitter has a real purpose or filling a real communication need… but let’s get back to this later. For now, we’ll cover a couple of limitations of such messaging systems.

Limitations

Like I said, Twitter is really a mail like system with almost the same problems or limitations:

1. Load and scalability
   One of the first issue Twitter encountered was scalability. In the early days, the website and notifications suffered notification delays and off-times. This seems in order for now. But think about how Twitter is built… it’s a pyramidal scheme. You know a bit like this never ending mail chains. Each time someone tweets (and is possibly retweeted), all his community has to be notified. This results in a fast growing function, moreover since people are now followed and following thousand of people.
2. Privacy
   The starting point of Twitter is like public broadcast. You have no real way to contact a specific group of people. You may either broadcast to everyone following you, or use direct messaging. Replies are in a middle ground: public message but intended to one person. A last remark, if you are “public”, you’ll need to clean your new followers from time to time.
3. Authenticity
   Like blogger identity theft, there is no way to really authenticate a Twitter profile. And if you think “Who cares?”, do not forget about the emerging business uses of PR agency or branding.
4. Spam and virus
   Last but far to be the least, Twitter will suffer spam issues (and maybe virus). I was wondering when I would see the first attempt of spam, and here it goes (DO NOT USE THIS!). There are 2 related concerns. First, you don’t have practical metrics to know if a threat is really widely spread (unless you’ve got some friends working on some alpha project)  Second, Twitter makes great use of tinyurl.com or bit.ly services, making it harder to filter spam messages.

The first and last problems are really the most important to me. And I think that if Twitter do not offer soon a reliable way to handle these, it will become a really messy place where you’ll keep blocking user to keep your account clean.

Content

It is now time to think about the What? What content do you think Twitter messages contain? Here is my personal short list:

• Personal status: hello world, I’m hungry/tired/sad/happy/…, I’m going to the movies,  and so on
• Weather or Earth related news: snow, rain, hurricanes, earthquakes, …
• Twitter itself: a lot of tweet are about the platform itself, talking about twitter status, features or discovery of a new twitter tool
• Funny and ephemere URLS like youtube, vimeo, slideshare, …
• Notifications: blog posts or alerts

I maybe forgot some typical use, but do you find any of this kind of “news” relevant to you ? Yes, it’s funny like a mail forward, and it’s also quick like IM. But nothing in there really sounds like a business or work related feature. For the sake of argument, I should mention the presence vertical markets around twitter, community-based like stocktwits or monitoring tools like tweetag. Eventually, a lot of people consider Twitter being the same as FaceBook status (there also has been rumor about twitter buy out).

With such frivolous content in a very limited messaging container, isn’t Twitter about massive noise production overall the Gen-Y generation of blogs and IM ?

Next step?

So this is IMHO the big picture of the current Twitter world. A last note worth mentioning is how Twitter has still not clearly defined any business model. This has already been widely discussed in the twitto-bloggo-sphere and you can find plenty of resource on your favorite search engine.

As for now, the last approach seems to be “Buy a friend” model. This is far to be stupid but it is based on the assumption that tweet does actually contains relevant or useful information. This may be true but I’d rather doubt that for the time being. Do not forget the Burger King experiment with Facebook: WhopperSacrifice showed up how really your virtual friends are important to you.

Let’s hope Twitter does not end up in an alternative spam-full media.