Twitter as a communication platform

In a prior post, I discussed how Dell uses twitter as a simple communications channel to get promotions out. There are other companies in the emerging Twitter ecosystem which do something similar - i.e. use Twitter as the underlying communications platform. One such company is Stoctwits.

Stocktwits is a web-site for stock traders. Users can connect to Stocktwits using their Twitter accounts and share emerging financial news with other users on Stocktwits. Twitter serves as the underlying communications mechanism to ferry messages between users and Stocktwits provides additional functionality such as charting and filtering on top of the underlying Twitter APIs. Stocktwits derives revenues from Display Ads on the site as well as by charging users for subscription access to the tips and musings of finance bloggers on the Stocktwits web-site.

Is Twitter's communication facility, enough of a killer app to drive the development of a substantial ecosystem around Twitter? The jury is still out on this. While some people feel comfortable broadcasting their lives through Twitter, the communications facility has yet to truly hit mass appeal. In comparison, back around 2007, one of the key features that made Facebook hugely popular was photo sharing - uploading photos to Facebook too the drudgery out of sharing photos with friends and family via email or email + upload to a non-Facebook website. Once you uploaded pictures, Facebook took care of broadcasting the pictures out. I.e Facebook enabled a much simpler workflow for the average user than was previously possible. In my opinion, a similar killer app awaits invention at Twitter.