Pallian Creative

Twitter - A One Way Street

Twitter is literally EVERYWHERE these days! I was watching hulu the other night, and someone mentioned on some random show that Darth Vader was on twitter! Darth Vader?! Did a little google search and sure enough, @darthvader is definitely on twitter - and with over 53k followers! That got me thinking, how many users are out there on twitter who use it primarily to read tweets (from fictional amusing characters like Darth Vader) and not necessarily participate in the 140 character bandwagon? I did some stats testing on Tweetizen and I was surprised that even though there was an increase in traffic and a ton of grouping activity going on, not a lot of tweets were being sent out. I can see how Twitter, to someone new, can be a great resource to find quick real-time information on a topic they are interested in, but not necessarily ready to share their personal up to the minute status updates.

This is technically good news for us, since we want more people to embrace the twitter culture. And even though they may not necessarily be twittering about what they are doing any given minute, they are using it as a real-time information source to find news and trends happening NOW. Which brings me to the next point - how about having the capability to bring this real-time streaming news and trends to your own website?

Until now, websites could only install plugins or widgets that were one directional. Tweetizen aims to change this. We’ll be launching a series of plugins and widgets that will make it possible for any site or blog to easily embed a group of tweets that are relevant to the topic of the site. An example would be - say you own an iPhone Breaking News blog and you want your readers to have up to the minute news on all things iPhone. Until now, the only to do this was to 1) blog about it or 2) tweet about it yourself. With Tweetizen’s groups, you’ll be able to stream not just YOUR latest breaking news tweets, but tweets from anyone who may have better and more up to the minute tweets. Our filtering mechanism will make sure only tweets relevant to your blog shows up. This gives your blog a huge advantage because you can now keep readers on your site and they’ll never have to refresh the page, since everything we serve will be real-time and streaming.

Call me biased, but I see huge growth potential for Twitter in this. Readers to your sites who have yet to signup with Twitter will now see a good enough reason to join just to be able to participate and share their view in 140 characters. And since Twitter is so mobile these days, they can tweet from anywhere and have their tweets stream in to your site. This can be especially great when a news is just breaking.

So if you’re new to twitter and wondering what the fuss is all about - head over to Tweetizen and find a group that interests you. If you don’t find one, then simply create one in a few simple steps and keep abreast with all the latest chatter on the topic. And if you’re here just to kill time, there’s always @darthvader with a ton of Star Wars humor to keep you entertained.