Future of Twitter

What's happening?

Twitter has approximately 190 million users since 2010, yet still seems to have plenty of untapped potential. I was actually asked during an Associate Product Manager interview for Google last semester about what I thought the future of

Twitter would be. I answered to the best of my ability at the time, however, after all the di

scussion in class about the power of social media, this question has resurfaced in my mind with many fresh ideas.

With a slogan of "What's happening?," obviously Twitter's basic premise is to let people know what's going on around the world or around a social network at any given time. However, with Facebook getting more and more support, such as the Goldman Sachs investment which valued Facebook at ~$50 billion, Twitter needs to start thinking about how to establish its platform for the future.

Social OS

After receiving a free Google Chrome OS net book on Friday (Chrome OS is a internet-only browser based operating system), I started thinking about whether or not Twitter can become an operating system of some sort as well, a "Social OS." With the proper integration into many current applications, Twitter could even compete with Facebook as a primary portal to our social network. Twitter will serve as our source of news and information, as well as a central hub for communication for many individuals. I believe that it will enhance our relationships both inside and outside our own personal social networks.

Blogging has begun to supplant traditional media as a source of news, information, and entertainment, and Twitter (micro-blogging) will continue that trend of separating the mainstream audience from traditional media. To many users, Twitter already serves as an online newspaper for certain information (sports news for me), and I believe that it will continue to spread. As Twitter develops its reinforcement learning search algorithms, search results will turn up smarter and more relevant results, instead of just the random babble that still comes out much of the time. "Targeted Tweets" will serve as focused hyper-local marketing for relevant users similar to how Starbucks targeted users in a multi-million dollar advertising campaign using Twitter as the platform. The "Targeted Tweets" will also be used to push relevant local news since Twitter is closely tied to your location through geolocation on phones. Obviously, user interface revisions will need to be done to better display these different features though since the current display is usually quite cluttered unless manually put into different lists.

In order to serve as a realistic social operating system, Twitter needs its own applications as well. These can include short note taking apps, photo album sharing apps, micro-payment apps, investment-tracking financial apps, and many more that can take advantage of Twitter's micro-media/sharing platform. These apps can be developed by freelancing developers and should be fully integrated into the user's Twitter in some way similar to installing apps on Android, Facebook, or iPhone. Currently, Twitter does not incorporate apps like how Facebook incorporates them, but I believe with the proper UI design and integration, this would be an amazing addition to the Twitter platform.

Text Tweet Messaging

I also believe that Twitter will eventually replace normal SMS text messaging. Eventually it will be the standard application on phones used to "tweet" back and forth (with the option of doing it through private channels of course) instead of "texting" back and forth. The beauty of it is that you can "tweet" with famous celebrities as well as opposed to the normal range of people that you can text with using the current SMS messaging system. I actually just sent a message to my favorite athlete, Lawrence Timmons on the Pittsburgh Steelers who also went to my high school, and he replied directly back to me. To be able to contact famous celebrities was unheard of before the age of Twitter. I think that "tweet messaging" will have its own private interface (displayed like a tweet mailbox) separate from the omni-directional tweets that are sent out now though and displayed more like a texting application, slightly different from the current "Messages" section of Twitter.

I believe that as the technology develops, this will become so common that our children will wonder how we ever survived with the limited number of people we could contact by texting. Just like how Facebook is slowly replacing standard emailing, Twitter will slowly replace texting.

Other Thoughts?

Many don't think that Twitter will survive, and some don't see it as being a very powerful tool, in general. However, I think that if pushed in the right direction and marketed correctly, Twitter could be a genuine, trendy competitor to the more widely used, but traditional, Facebook, similar to how the trendy Mac has been battling against the more established PC.