Twitter - Universal Content Delivery System?
I started playing with twitter today. Anyone know why twitter makes a call to www.plaxo.com during the registration process?
Once you get past the initial overwhelming “this has got to be a fad” feeling, it seems that there is great potential for twitter alerts to deliver all sorts of information - news headlines, weather, flight status updates and more. Right now the API is a little thin, but with a simple HTTP POST you can update your twitter feed programatically with just about anything.
I know that content feeds and alerts are nothing new, but the difference is that twitter has the potential to be a one stop shop for content delivery. Instead of bouncing around from source to source and subscribing to content alerts, you simply friend those sources in twitter. You can already get BBC Tech headlines via twitter, for example.
What if you could combine several friends into a single source or group and get updates from that group in a single update at a predefined time? For example if content was being delivered from MSNBC, Yahoo! News, and the BBC, I could get a single combined alert every 30 minutes. I have not had time to explore twitter fully, so if this functionality already exists let me know.
Twitter alerts are being delivered outside of twitter as well. I’ve seen lots of blog widgets, dashboard widgets, a Vista sidebar gadget and many others. Seems like content providers would want to tap into that enthusiastic user base, right Joe?
For us, I could see something like a new recipe delivered daily/hourly from our Betty Crocker brand, a travel tip from Frommers, or even a productivity trick from Lifehacker.
Anyone else seeing the serious potential for a viral content delivery system, or am I missing the point?
Similar Posts
- Twitter as a Marketing Tool
- O’Reilly Forges Ahead with New E-Content Initiative
- Consuming Content: Are you a Grazer or a Super-User?
- Twitter is a Conversation Ecosystem
- Social Communications
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the RSS feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader. You can also sign up to receive updates via email using the form at the top of this page.
Comments
[...] Net’s David Berlind picks up on a meme I discussed back in March. Like blogging, I see Twitter more as a disruptive Web publishing tool with ramifications to [...]
[...] dabbled in Twitter, I considered many possibilities. Using it to deliver content was one of them. Chris Webb had a similar [...]
[...] Webb writes that he thinks Twitter is going to earn a place as a universal content delivery system. My thoughts on this are a little different. Reading his post it seems like he thinks it [...]