Most of you might have heard about the latest trend: twitter.com. At first I thought the idea was really stupid and could only be used for egocentric people (like me):

• twitter is a blog that allows you to write posts with a maximum of about 250 characters
• these one-liners can be 'watched' by your friends or you can watch your friends

"I'm at the backery", "Britney spears is so cool!" are examples of these so-called 'tweets'. But these examples are bad. Like blogging, people can write really really useless things. Blogs are also most often abused by people who write about 'how depressed they are' or how shallow they are.

But some blogs, a small number, provide real high quality content. Some of them even get printed to books (The book I'm reading now by Seth Godin appears to be a printout of his blog).

If I'm right, blog posts are micro-content (and my semantic web obsessed colleague can correct me if I'm wrong). Quality blog posts are on average the size of magazine articles and they provide the same information. Blog posts have the extra advantage of being interconnected in the blogosphere.

Twitter on the other hand is nano-content, and it has obviously other uses. People are not quite clear yet about these uses. An example of high quality tweets are: "stranded in Korea because of typhoon" and "Harry Potter dies in the end". These provide quick communications to the people that are subscribed to your messages.

Another use would be to use twitter as a thought notebook, where you can write little ideas like "hey, what about yocto-content" or "KFC is booming here, buy KFC China stocks". An advantage that these tweets have is that they can be written quickly which allows you to have a very active messaging stream. This is one of the main abstract uses of twitter: displaying activity. My colleage had an interesting suggestion that just like corporate blogs, there might be a use for corporate twitter-like applications.

As a wannabe entrepreneur, I think there are 2 big opportunities here:

Twitter without the hype

There are many tools that make twittering more easy, like twittermail (mail2twitter). But there is one obvious thing always painfully stuck in our eyes: the big ugly twitter logo on our profiles. On your twitter page (like http://twitter.com/dominiek) you can only customize the layout for a bit, but it will always look like this.

Therefore, it would be great to have a service that allows you to simply have a list of latest-thoughts or latest-communiques. Also allowing geeks to put in their own markup code and to attach their own domains (like thoughts.dominiek.com). But more importantly to allow corporations to make use their own brand. So this service should be transparent and brandless (conforms with Seth's statement that branding is a dying industry, sorry Russ Meyer).

Yocto-content

If twitter is nano content, would something even smaller also work? Let's check wikipedia for a name:

So what would this yocto-content look like? Probably one word or a hyphened word. You can have a stream of simple keywords to 'tag your life' in a way. For example: work, container, work, work, namkee, heineken, back-to-work, vacation, china, work, holland, bureaucracy, fly, korean You could then visualize this stream (over time) like a tagcloud. Also you can compare it to the cloud of other people and detect similar lives or interests. Other uses are still to be explored.. ;]

As you might notice, I added a tagcloud to the top of this page. This tagcloud is a ‘cloud’ that contains all keywords assigned to resources on this blog. On first sight it looks like a standard tagcloud, like the one seen on del.icio.us.

This tagcloud is different however! I gave it something special: awareness of ‘the collective’, the blogosphere.

I spend a few hours today connecting this cloud to the web’s central bookmarking website: del.icio.us. This funny named website has an instant stream of new tagged resources every minute. The tagcloud above will highlight any tag the moment one has been added into the collective.

Note: it’s still a little buggy, since del.icio.us doesn’t allow too much RSS traffic, I will need to optimize that.

Publishing

The past 3 days I had a small tech/art/media conference on The Internet of Things’ (by Mediamatic). This event showed me that media-people can think very different then technologists. Apart from dressing very fashionable and using Mac’s, they also care a lot about digital appearance. I noticed most people I met had a Blog and had it well-connected to Flickr. My Blog is sort of isolated from the internet and I don’t spend so much time on managing my ‘second life’. In the workshop one of the speakers, Julian Bleecker, said he advises his students to publish every failed idea they had. In this way, people who try that again can learn from the published mistakes. I agree and I think more people should take the effort to work towards ‘the collective’.

Interconnecting

John Battelle, in his book about search explained his view on immortality in the epilogue of the book. Battelle explained that the internet allows more people to become immortal in a way, as long as information is kept alive into the indexes of Google. I think this is incomplete. The Library of Alexandria has been destroyed numerous times by man, resulting in the death of many ‘immortals’. ‘Immortality’ of information can never be guaranteed, but the chances of long survival get more when the information spread is more wide. Therefore, the Google index is not enough (My old websites are deleted from the index anyway). It’s important to spread the information, using trackbacks, references, quotations, alternative blogspheres like Technorati.

Tagging

Tagging, assigning a keyword to a virtual object. I’m still a little puzzled about the importance of it. At this moment I really think it’s important to take a good effort to tag all your resources, especially visual material. Resources are found much better if you have accurate keywords assigned tot them. In the future this will be replaced by either generating these keywords from the resources itself or actually understanding the resources itself. I can imagine that this is will take longer with pictures and videos (more complex).

My 2nd life

I think a lot of people agree (at least in the workshop) that the virtual world and the physical world will merge inevitably. It might take some time, although I think thing’s will go quite fast once Nanotechnology takes shape. Anyway, I think it’s important to start taking your own 2nd life into account since it will be a big part of your 1st life.

My resolutions:

• Publishing more
• Interconnecting more: Making my blog known at technorati.
• Interconnecting more: Linking more to others.
• Interconnecting more: Moving my pictures to Flickr.com.
• Interconnecting more: Tagging better.