A few use cases for Twitter

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080903-twitter-far-more-than-what-i-had-for-lunch-today.html

- Scottsdale police department is publishing (minor) community news: potholes, burglars
- Comcast is looking for angry customers
- Serialized fiction (my professional opinion: total dud)
- Amazon has created what’s basically an AIM bot, using the twitter reply mechanism
- Corporate blogs, except smaller (I’m not big on this, either)

AIM bots via twitter, twitter in an AIM bot . . . . what looks like a patchwork is shaping up nicely, I think, into a very generalized idea of “publishing”, publishing with absolute flexibility as to audience and grain size.

All kinds of entities can publish messages (the Chicago Tribune; my grandma; my car; my toaster; my artificial left knee...), at different granularities, of different classes and priorities. What we are slowly building is a general means for orchestrating
- what messages I emit, to whom. The governing issue here is privacy and appropriateness.
- what messages I care to consume, and how. The governing issue here is convenience.

The first pre-requisite for building this general messaging system is a “network” -- social, I suppose, but so’s everything -- where I can enumerate what my relationship is to different entities. What is my level of trust and interest in: the Chicago Tribune; my grandma; my toaster; my left knee; my car; my car’s mechanic.

Once I have that all set up (which may take a few years yet), the rest is mostly plumbing: publishing and subscribing, and re-publishing. When I “subscribe” to my car, I’ll choose to get messages of some priority level (e.g. “low tire pressure”) along some appropriate and convenient channel {SMS | IM | email | whatever }. I’ll also re-publish some of that information, for instance to my spouse and my mechanic. The mechanic subscribes to me, his customer, through whatever channel is convenient for him — a work order system; email; a “podcast”(ish) where his incoming messages are batched “read” to him while he fixes cars; whatever. I may not know. The medium is not the message. The message will make its way through whatever medium makes the most sense.

In a corporate setting, I think we can safely stop asking “Is there any enterprise use for Twitter?”, because the question might as well be, “Is there any enterprise use for sending and receiving messages?”. The only question is, for a given class of messages, what is the most convenient and appropriate mechanism we can think of? If we discover what looks like a “new” medium at this point, the chances are we’ve simply discovered a nicer way of clustering and channeling a certain class of messages that already existed.