olivermeakings.com

Despite the insane media coverage in the last few months, I’m not really a twitter convert. Or wasn’t, I should say.

Sure, I got how it could help brands connect to their customers, how news stories could break there in real time, how it keeps people in touch, and the rest… but mainly I thought it was a overhyped fad full of the inane ramblings of egomaniacs.

That all changed today, when I realised the full potential of the service after manipulating the data pushed out by the service, using the twitter API. I started thinking about what could be done with twitter mashups and came up with the following random thoughts:

There’s conversations, lots of them
The crux of twitter - people pushing out small nuggets of text (less than 140 characters) they consider noteworthy, and others deeming it interesting enough to interrupt their day.  A quick search on twitter will show just how much noise there is, but different people find value in different things. There is however, no doubt that valuable conversations are going on with twitter, many of them outside the network of people you follow - and this is where mashups come in.

Why twitter data is ideal for mashups

The twitter API is 10X more popular than the site itself. Twitter has made available all the data pushed out by users for manipulation by your website or application. What can you do with it? The great thing is, although you’ve got quantity you haven’t got insane breadth - you have a username, tweet text, @ name, and potentially a location and picture with twitpic - all incredibly valuable when manipulated in certain ways, but not overwhelming.

This data is filterable
Users can filter out the noise of the conversation by choosing who to follow. If the person you follow starts pushing out more noise than value you can stop follwing them and the noise simply disappears. As a user, you’re already mining the twitter conversations based on people.

So what do mashups add? Using the twitter API, application developers can start filtering out the noise from the whole crowd to bring back only what is interesting to certain you. What’s your passion topic? People are already talking about it on twitter. You might not be following them, but those conversations are happening and the right mashup can bring them to you.

More value: this is real-time, anywhere

Twitter is all about what you’re doing, now. This data is as it happens - so trends, stories and opinions are breaking and evolving there. The web instriscally is linked to delivering content in a timely way, and twitter is the extreme of this.

This is local
This date is local - if you’re twittering from an iPhone you’re providing a location stamp on your potentially valuable conversation. Manipulating this data can add even more value. Now we’re getting killer - all of a sudden, we’ve got lots of location-based noise going on, but now we can filter out the noise and we’re left with valuable conversations and their locations.