Great job Dave Berlind wrote up a pretty interesting piece about how Twitter fits into the media ecosystem called Get ready for the ‘Twitterization’ of mainstream media, and there were some insightful comments that inspired me to leave a comment, which is listed down below. Berlind documents his track record of being a pretty good detector of the latest trends in the article, and I think he's right about where twitter may fit in -- in additional to other uses that he didn't think of -- as well as others that no one else has thought of either.
Here are my five thoughts that came up while reading this piece:
* When you were talking about investors using twitter to pass on up to the second analysis and recommendations, I wondered whether this would be a good or bad thing. It could even make the market more susceptible to volatile fluctuations due to potential rumor mongering or stock manipulation -- or even due to honest mistakes or miscommunication. The recent incident w/ the APPL stock comes to mind. On the other hand, there do seem to be just as many if not more positively useful implications that you describe.
* I actually find myself writing and re-wording a post many times to maximize the information that I can pack into the 140 character limit. So I'm impressed that you can hit your max in 10 seconds flat. :)
* A lot of people use the TinyURL or URLTea service to reduce the URI down to a more manageable size. Specifically the bookmarklet that will autogenerate the smaller URI. Twitter has tinyURL built in, but it's not completely evident when it kicks & how it effects your character count. Some people have reported being able to exceed your 140 character count by waiting to paste the tinyURL in at the very end.
* 30 Boxes did a really useful Firefox plugin called PowerTwitter that will make hypertext links more multi-media friendly. It'll replace links w/ the HTML Title (even tinyURL links) and embed Flickr photos or YouTube videos right into your twitter stream -- all of this is from extrapolated from the URL. So people with this plug-in can actually get a lot out of URLs, even without having to click through.
* Live twittering is another great media application of twitter that I have experimented with -- it actually helps to use the 140 restriction to digest information coming at you live. There are some real knowledge management implications here to be explored as well. The only problem is potentially overwhelming your twitter followers with non-relevent info, which is why I created an alterego twitter account over at http://www.twitter.com/kentbye_tech to give myself more freedom to experiment with it. My main profile over at http://www.twitter.com/kentbye