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.. ;]