The future of Twitter

With more than 145 million active users in September 2010 according to its official blog, Twitter® certainly delivered on its initial promises of influence and popularity. The new question now is what will the future of Twitter be like? According to co-founder Biz Stone in an interview for GigaOM, the future of Twitter will be decided by what its users are doing with it. However, two main aspects of the future of Twitter are already emerging: more focus on attracting businesses as paying users and on leveraging the huge amount of real-time data contained in the tweets.

Attracting businesses as paying users

If Twitter is going to make money from the service, it will certainly rely on money coming from businesses, not from individual users. The first reason is that individual users will simply not pay for the service. The 2010 Digital Future Study released by USC Annenberg found that not one (0 percent!) of the respondents would be willing to pay for Twitter. The second reason is that Twitter has indeed something very valuable to offer to business users: direct, real-time access to a large number of potential clients. To exploit this potential, Twitter will likely evolve in the near future to focus more on new services and features specifically aimed at business users.

Existing features for business users and future developments

Twitter already took the first steps in providing services aimed at business users. At the beginning of 2010, it launched the Promoted Tweets feature to offer targeted advertisement. In addition, it put together a freely available Web-based guide that includes case studies to show how Twitter can help a company's business and explains to businesses how to make better use of Twitter. However, the success of Twitter in attracting business users is likely to depend on the available business-focused applications. Currently there are relatively few of those, such as the collaboration platform CoTweet or the Twitter Management System from Buddy Media. As Twitter focuses more on attracting business clients, the future of Twitter will likely mean a rapid development of new business-focused applications as well.

Leveraging the data

The second main direction of development in the near future of Twitter is toward a better leveraging of the data. Millions of Twitter users contribute daily through their tweets large amounts of real-time data currently unavailable anywhere else. Existing approaches to leverage this data include search functionalities and using the data for predictions and market decisions. However, these are only initial approaches, and the future of Twitter will likely focus increasingly on new ways of extracting valuable information from its data.

Twitter as a search engine

Twitter first incorporated a search functionality into its site in early 2009. The opinions were divided, with some considering that Twitter is not a real search engine and others arguing that Twitter is the real future of search and a potential competitor for Google™, as it draws on real-time content and the power of social networks to deliver better-targeted, better-filtered and more trustworthy results.

Although there haven't yet been spectacular developments of the search feature of Twitter, this is likely to change. In December 2010, Twitter proved that it has serious plans regarding its searching services, as it took action to obtain ownership of the twittersearch.com domain.

Twitter for prediction and market decisions

The most recent approaches to leverage the unique data of Twitter include the prediction of box-office revenues and that of the Dow Jones industrial average.

A recent study from HP Labs used the chatter from Twitter to successfully forecast box-office revenues from movies. Another article from Bloomberg reports that a family-owned hedge fund plans to use a trading model that relies on the number of occurrences of certain words such as "calm" in tweets to predict daily moves in the Dow Jones industrial average that can be used to inform market decisions. These existing predictions simply show some of the potential of Twitter data. However, the future will likely bring new approaches to exploit Twitter data.

Conclusions

As Twitter reached a significant number of registered users, its main focus is slowly changing from attracting new users to finding ways to make money from the service. Twitter's main assets are its large number of users and the huge amount of real-time data that they contribute through their tweets. Consequently, the future of Twitter will likely consist in the development of new approaches to leverage the data and to provide businesses with access to potential customers. However, which of these approaches will be successful depends ultimately on whether they also bring value to the individual users of Twitter.