Real time search, angel or evil

Twitter is hardly a technology breakthrough in any sense whatsoever, fairly speaking, I think that is a general opinion. Evan Williams, however, has taken the second position in "Top 100 most influential people in tech", right after Sergey & Larry.

One of my colleagues says, "too much twittering makes a twat".

So, what is the big deal? 140 characters a time (for ASCII, Unicode you only get half the amount), one would wonder what the importance that would carry, unavoidably. On another hand, there is no rules or regulations for anyone to register an account as yet. Although rumour says that Twitter will introduce premier account to avoid people stole celebrities' identities. So, what's the catch?

My stand is very clear - I love twitter, not because it is a new gadget, in my opinion, Twitter has achieved two things, firstly, Twitter has provided a platform and encourage fidelity in Internet communication; secondly, Twitter is building up an ideal personalised direct marketing channel, which could potentially has very high hit rate. Some has categorised, wrongly, Twitter as a networking or community tool in my opinion. The most significant difference Twitter has made is it does nothing else other than provide a channel, means, not content.

Twitter has 45 millions registered users, numerous third party connectors and clients interfaces. Many, not just individuals, have started to realise the benefit of reaching to audiences and potential customers (in commercial sense) through this channel. It is on the way of no longer being a virtual identity in Second Life. The fidelity it has introduced and the initiatives subscribers have taken, has been essential to allow others to learn and adopt this model elsewhere. There are some early adaptors exploring the opportunity in real time search domain - mostly linking the keyword from tweets to prepared advertisement. Of course I will still block the spammers without a slight hesitance, the trend is looking good.