[this has to be quick as I'm running late for the Web2Open, but...]
Currently, many companies are using Twitter for their service updates or company announcements (or, in the case of the news, for headlines)…but they aren’t allowing the users to interact with their sites/apps in the other direction.
Akin to YubNub, I think it’s high time that web apps start looking at Twitter as their Command Line Interface. A way for me to quickly retrieve data, like addresses from local search (as in the example I concocted above for a Yahoo!Local search), to send in information (i.e. sending your timetracking to Harvest, or a command to Blinksale to invoice a client, etc.).
We have many options we for Onramps, but I think Twitter provides a really useful, simple baseline to work with. Perhaps it will be their ultimate business model?
Hell, if the web apps don’t build it, we could always do some experimentation with this over the next two days of the Mashroom. 
Add in the ability for Mac users to use Quicksilver to update Twitter (http://integral.grahamenglish.net/graham-english/iquicktwitter-my-quicksilver-twitter-ichat-growl-hack/) and you have a really powerful combination of tools.
It’s for cases like this that I really wish I could code in a useful language.
- Neil.
with twitter not being ssl encrypted (which means anyone in your network can hijack your account) i consider this an interesting but rather careless idea
ActiveBuddy/BuddyScript/Conversagent provided this on IM…though it never quite took off. SmarterChild could do all this.
Sure, but everyone and their dog uses Twitter. It’s an opportunity.
Yes…and maybe that is the issue to solve.
Definitely the search feature isn’t that ‘careless’.
Hey Tara, don’t forget Google SMS for your Yahoo Local-like searches
You’ve hit on a great idea, though. Several services let you interact with their offerings via SMS, but with the reach Twitter has, it could let developers build services on top of it’s interface, making the room for innovation much, much larger. Arguably, they already do this via their API, but the interface is still a little lacking in parts (and of course they’ve got to get rid of their performance problems until they can really roll out something robust enough to manage the calls of a million mashups mashing. You can bet, though, that this is going to be the future of Twitter and a lot of other apps on the web!
Take a look at my friends at IMified. They’ve built a platform that offers a command line for the web over instant messaging. IM has significantly more market penetration than Twitter (or to riff off Tara’s statement, everybody and their mother uses IM).
http://imified.com/
Oh, yeah, and they’re already got an API that allows developers to build services on top of it.
That’s my point, though
Everyone uses IM. IM is on cell phones. The opportunity was there as well. It was there for businesses too.
It’s interesting to sit back and watch the blogosphere revisit concepts that have been around for a while for the hyped web “2.0″ application d’jour. What ever happened to “as we look to the future, we should examine our past?”
As an aside, remember the cumulative advantage story in the NYT? That perfectly explains the case of Twitter, where Leo & Scoble were primarily responsible for pushing it to stardom in the blogosphere.
I do like that Tara was one of the early adopters who tried to find value in Twitter instead of randomly posting what you’re doing.
“Currently, many companies are using Twitter for their service updates or company announcements”
Is it “many”? Really? How about “some”? or “several”? or even “dozens” (which sounds high)?
http://twitter.pbwiki.com/NonHumanNonIndividuals
;P
I think I counted 67 accounted for…
Um…which doesn’t count the news sites, the twitter apps (very recursive), etc.
touche!
but it’s still not “many”!
Oh…your a big numbers guy, then. How many is many for you?
Many is a handful for me.
I believe Tara may have been using the Kender scale of counting:
“One, two, some, many”
- Neil.
Re twitter and company paranoia – ranting at a small conference we ran for grad recruiters earlier today about social networking tools/web ’2′ sense-making tools and so on and one woman commented how she wasn’t allowed to look at ANY websites without applying in writing! The excuse is terrorism, viruses etc. The reality is the ongoing addiction of so many corporate IT departments to a panoptical view of the world.
So how are you imagining they send the data back once you’ve sent out the tweet “request”? Direct messgage? I couldn’t imagine they’d do a directed tweet (e.g. “@missrogue: Lulu SF: 123 22nd St”) because when usage grows it’d be too much noise.