I’ve seen people commenting of their dislike of people using twitter as an instant messaging platform. Meh, let it go, people use technology to fill a need. In twitters case; instant gratification messaging(IGM) or as I like to pronounce it; i-gem. Because it’s all about the users. Me and my comment gems!

Feel the urge to scream but don’t want to wake the neighbours? Twitter it.
Just want to share some quick news but don’t think it warrants the effort of email spamming your friends? Twitter it.
Need to take note of an idea that just popped into your head? Twitter it.
Want to build a spam bot? Twitter with it.
Twitter, twitter, twitter it.

But that’s only part of the picture. You see producers and users are also consumers and Twitter can be useful for those who like to track other people and services live via instant messaging alerts or track through aggregation a users past history.

See a twitter you want to comment on? Twitter it using an @username.
See a twitter you find hilarious? Laugh at it. Then star it. (How long will it be before you can send new stars to all your friends?)
See an interesting twitter link? Click on it. Then star it. (One wonders how long tinyurl will stay tiny!)

Now we have a rudimentary bookmarking service and an instant messaging service with offline messaging capabilities. Just add tags and public and private syntax. What about emotions? Emphasis and emoticons…
But then how much is too much? After all; cross-platform plain-text communication is what Twitter does best. For that reason at most I can see them adding prefix and suffix syntax. Maybe prefix an exclamation to make a message private, etc.

But wait there’s more to Twitter than meets the eye! As the BBC example has shown, news producers can be pushed through alerts and marketed through Twitter. No reason other marketers won’t do the same, and monetise it. People are also using it to solicit requests for recommendations on products or for advice. So we can add rudimentary user-centric Vendor Relationship Management “personal requests” into the mix. No reason not to place ads next to those and monetise them on site in request and question channels…

I could see people starting to claim things about others on there too, similar to what Jyte is doing now, and it will only take time before there are proper groups you can join to assert your affiliation. Some people are already creating open accounts anyone can post to. Others are creating accounts to aggregate groups of friends together, creating custom nodes for like-minded individuals. Then there’s the band of often hilarious fakesters and fantasy writers pretending to be someone or something else.

But as with any communications service, they quickly draw the attention of fraudsters. I wonder how long it will be before the first widely publicised “incident” occurs from unsavoury types surveying peoples habits. Already there’s a rudimentary GeoTwitter tracking users locations. While I’d like to believe that the more open we are the more that benefits society, at the same time, not everyone is created equal and some will use that to their own benefit.

Which brings me to a conclusion.

Twitter just isn’t there for me yet. Not for the lack of anything mentioned above. But for the identity-less nature of the service. Decentralised, user-centric instant gratification messaging is still maturing but it’s not there yet. Twitter is a great start but I’d like to see something like OpenID Attribute Exchange and extensions made use of.

Let me store my messages, my history, on my own archival service in a way that lets me choose who can have access to it and for how long. With our Lifestreams carrying such personal information, it makes a lot of sense to me that I have the ability to control that and disperse my information through a controlled means of Identity Rights Agreements, with some of that information over secure lines. So much more can then be done with that structured data.

Saying that, I think a Twitter-like service could be the kick starter the SemWeb needs to really go mainstream if we can get a basic syntax people can use happening for structuring everyday tasks.

Afterthought: What Twitter really needs to go even more viral than it already is, is a “track me on twitter” widget users can add to their blog/site for visitors to click on and subscribe to immediately if they already have a Twitter account.

p.s. I thought about twittering just that afterthought… argh! it’s addictive.