I started playing with twitter today. Anyone know why twitter makes a call to www.plaxo.com during the registration process?
Once you get past the initial overwhelming “this has got to be a fad” feeling, it seems that there is great potential for twitter alerts to deliver all sorts of information – news headlines, weather, flight status updates and more. Right now the API is a little thin, but with a simple HTTP POST you can update your twitter feed programatically with just about anything.
I know that content feeds and alerts are nothing new, but the difference is that twitter has the potential to be a one stop shop for content delivery. Instead of bouncing around from source to source and subscribing to content alerts, you simply friend those sources in twitter. You can already get BBC Tech headlines via twitter, for example.
What if you could combine several friends into a single source or group and get updates from that group in a single update at a predefined time? For example if content was being delivered from MSNBC, Yahoo! News, and the BBC, I could get a single combined alert every 30 minutes. I have not had time to explore twitter fully, so if this functionality already exists let me know.
Twitter alerts are being delivered outside of twitter as well. I’ve seen lots of blog widgets, dashboard widgets, a Vista sidebar gadget and many others. Seems like content providers would want to tap into that enthusiastic user base, right Joe?
For us, I could see something like a new recipe delivered daily/hourly from our Betty Crocker brand, a travel tip from Frommers, or even a productivity trick from Lifehacker.
Anyone else seeing the serious potential for a viral content delivery system, or am I missing the point?
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