Russ Gray's Blog

Any active user of the interwebs can scarcely be unaware of Twitter, which is commonly summarised as ‘Facebook status on crack’. It’s basically a service, a little like a blog, where each entry is limited to 140 characters and you can post directly from the web, a desktop client, or your mobile phone via SMS.

And I just can’t see the point. Let’s consider some ways in which it is described and used:

1. Facebook status on crack? Big whoop, I don’t use Facebook, and don’t even update the status on my IM client when I go for lunch. Why would I use a service built entirely around a feature I don’t care for?
2. Microblogging? I’m verbose at the best of times. 140 characters? You can keep it. And no, I’m not going to compress the content – when I write an SMS message, i don’t use txtspeak. EVER. The English language is abused enough without reducing it to feeble vowel-less abbreviations.
3. Follow your favourite celeb? Oh please. As if the celebrity-worship culture isn’t bad enough, now I’m being encouraged to pay even MORE attention to such vacuous nonentities as Miley Cyrus or Peaches Geldof? I think I’m safe in saying that there is no thought or feeling that Peaches Geldof will ever express in her life that would be of passing interest to me.
4. Join the conversation? A lot of people have told me that if I just tried it, I’d ‘get it’. I tried it. I don’t get it. I am yet to see a single ‘tweet’ that actually conveys interesting or useful information. And no, some stranger saying ‘I was just in a plane crash!‘ is not interesting or useful.

And yet…suddenly there are a couple of promising things popping up. Dave Lloyd notes that it can be considered a non-performant event broker. Tweet what you eat acts as a simple calorie counter without the hassle of installing some clunky software on your phone. These are much more interesting ideas.

The first is based on the idea that whilst I don’t care what Peaches Geldof is doing, I might well care about the fact that a batch of fresh loaves has just come out of the twitter-aware oven in the baker next door and oh look, it’s lunchtime!

The second is simply leveraging Twitter to provide interesting SMS applications without all the integration and billing headaches that normally come from trying to do SMS stuff. Trust me, I’ve done this the hard way at a previous company, it isn’t fun.

So not fun, in fact, that this is a huge potential untapped market because the barrier to entry, historically, is too high. Twitter has now flattened that barrier, and that may well be its biggest contribution. Tweetwhatyoueat may be one of the first breakers in a huge wave of SMS-driven tools, and that’s a good thing.

I may become a fan yet.