Twinfrastructure
by Imran Ali
I missed this - an article comparing Twitter and Pownce with 37Signals, Twitter’s future is almost casually mentioned as an infrastructure play. I think so too; Twitter has altered what I think of as presence - fundamentally and elegantly.
As a mobile+web utility platform, ‘powering presence across a variety of devices, contexts, applications and services’ it seems Twitter could make an end run around the big IM networks and ‘own’ digital presence and availability altogether; for both people and machines. Indeed, the potential for Twitter a s a key component of machine-2-machine infrastructure is underlined in Tim O’Reilly’s post on Twittering You Home, where Tim highlights Twitter as one of many apps ‘that are really communications multiplexers. The theme of being able to reroute communications, whether web, email, sms, IM, or voice, to the device of your choice, is a major one.’
As an infrastructure play, however, is one potential exit of the recent Twitter investment, a likely acquisition target for carriers or network vendors? Indeed, could those companies clone Twitter themselves?
