Don’t Shoot The Messenger - Just Change Him
by Ewan Spence
Twitter is held up by many in the Web 2.0 community as the future of messaging – in case you’ve not come across the service, it allows users to post short updates or messages (no more than 140 character), and then look at the updates (sometimes referred to as “tweets”) of only the people that they have chosen to friend.
But what makes Twitter a good pointer to the future isn’t the website, or the community. It’s the divorcing of the content of the messages from how it is displayed. While the normal way to interact with Titter is through its webpage (http://www.twitter.com/), there are other options that are much better suited to keeping the conversation flowing.
The most obvious one is the leveraging of SMS. With 160 characters available you can send and receive messages to the service with ease, simply through the text interface on your phone. I also suspect that, through bulk SMS purchasing and SMS short-codes, has provided a nice revenue stream. It’s the same content, but with a different presentation.
Twitter also supply a mobile page for the browser in our handset, http://m.twitter.com/, which takes the same content from your friends, but presents it in a much more compacted format, which works well on the smart phone browsers. Same content, different presentation.
And then there are the clients – third party programs that freely take the content out of the Titter web server and present it in new ways. I want to highlight Twhirl here, even though it’s not strictly a mobile app, it is a 2.0 version of messaging in my opinion. Twhirl is a desktop client that presents Twitter as if it was a massive IM like chatroom – and because of that I’ve been using Twitter a lot more, and in the more chatty sense. The underlying structure hasn’t changed, but the client (and others are available) are changing the delivery of the message, and making it more easily accessible depending on where (and sometimes when) you are.
They used to say don’t shoot the messenger – the great thing now is we get to choose our messenger… and the message still gets to us.
