Twittervision and Twitter

04Jun07

Twittervision is an offspring-cum-mashup of twitter. It allows you to see what everyone in the world is yabbering on about at twitter against a google map.

Although you can’t really do anything on Twittervision except pan and zoom (which is quite painful, really), it’s great fun to watch the world twitter about something or another.  It would have been so much cooler as a screensaver!

Since Twitter is truly a 2.0 concept, there is no comparison to the stuff we did in 1.0. It does, however, bring back memories of “pull and push” discussions. Once upon a time, many internet years ago, there were things like channels that would sit on your desktop and constantly pull news, financial data, etc. to users. Broadcasting to the desktop was something that a few dot coms obsessessed about. We were still at IE 4.0 and Netscape was still a serious contender in the browser wars.

All that is gone now, although some of it is re-emerging. Vista’s desktop widgets serve essentially the same function as IE 4.0 Channels and Active Desktop. It’s just a slicker way of doing things.

What twitter and its offsprings have shown is that the desktop is just half the story these days. Twitter works with SMS, RSS, web and instant messaging. How did they get here? My take is they focused on thinking in terms of messaging rather than applications.

In web 1.0, we had MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, Trillian, etc. Brainstorms were always focused on “creating another application” that works just as well and better. And ultimately finance would say “Is there room for another instant messenger?”

Twitter has dug much deeper. Kudos to that.

p.s. I don’t twitter. In fact, I couldn’t understand why it was such a craze. But now I know better

Filed under: Mashups, Social Networking, Web 2.0   |  Leave a Comment