Abhishek woke up around 9 this morning. He was rather tensed about his impending CREST quiz. I wished him best of luck for it. At 6pm I came to know that it didn’t go too well. Even though we are classmates at IIM Calcutta, I have not seen or spoken to him once in the last 2 weeks. So how do I know every detail of what he has been up to? The answer in one word is – Twitter.

Twitter has been labelled anything from a micro-blogging application to a continuous presence notifier to a viral, social instant messaging client. It is all of these and more. Twitter has exploited the comfort SMS created amongst the general tech-savvy populace in the usage of texting lingo. Its 140 character post limit encourages to-the-point communication, often supplemented by the compression conveniences of texting lingo like “c u l8er” (see you later) and “CAM” (Cannot agree more). It is sometimes described as the “SMS of the Internet” since the use of Twitter’s application programming interface for sending and receiving short text messages by other applications often eclipses the direct use of Twitter.

However, over the last 2 years or so, not a lot has changed at Twitter. The only modifications to Twitter’s interface have risen from the community before being adopted by the platform. The @reply method in Twitter was not created by them, users did it. Again, users created the # tag system as well, not Twitter. Twitter’s API (application programming interface) is what drives growth and change.  The API allows 3rd parties to create their own applications, and there are now hundreds – if not thousands – of Twitter tools, clients, and add-ons, and usage of the API is more than 20 times that of the actual site. To view the most creative innovations in Twitter from the last couple of years, one only needs to look outside the company, to related third-party applications or services that have cropped up using the Twitter platform.

TweetDeck is a desktop client for checking on a user’s Twitter stream during the day; it’s infinitely more efficient than the company’s own clunky site. Stock news can often be checked through StockTwits. Links can be shortened using bit.ly or another shortening service, which Twitter now uses to compress links into its 140 character scheme of things. Yet all these helpful innovations have emanated from outside Twitter’s confines.

In some ways, network effects for most software, as we see historically in the case of Microsoft’s Windows OS platform, are driven by getting others to work on tools that make more users dependent on a platform.

Twitter thrives on its ecosystem–the army of users and programmers and designers that are coming up with ways to make the Twitter experience more fulfilling. There is even a database at twitdom.com to document the list of Twitter applications. Here are a few of the most popular Twitter-based applications.

• Twipic: an app that lets users share pictures on Twitter. Users can post pictures to TwitPic from their phone, Twipic’s API, or through the site itself.
• Tweetdeck: is a Twitter app that streamlines notifications and tweets.
• Digsby: an application that centralizes e-mail, IM and social networking accounts into one desktop program.
• Twitterfeed: offers to automatically tweet posts published on a user’s blog using RSS.
• Twitterholic: This application lists the top 100 users of Twitter (or hyper-Twitterers, as I call them), ranked by their number of “followers.”
• Twhirl: is a desktop client for social software connecting to multiple accounts on different social networks
• Twiturly: tracks and ranks what URLs people are talking about on Twitter.

Companies are changing the way people use Twitter too.  Brands have started using Twitter for marketing & promotions, market research, and customer service. Jet Blue was one of the first companies to adopt Twitter for commercial use, and in addition to using Twitter to market its service and promote deals, they use it as a market research tool to see what people are saying about their company via search.twitter.com, and then as a customer service tool by responding via @replies or direct messages to customers.  5 years ago if a customer had a complaint about an airline they would have to call or write to the company. This often involved long response time and shoddy service. With Twitter, a customer may no longer even need to reach out to the airline. He can simply post an update that includes a gripe about their experience, and minutes later a representative from the company would contact him and ask what the problem was and how they can help rectify it. Using Twitter this way not only has the potential to humanize the brand, it replaces worn-out methods of communication with a real-time exchange, and puts the initiative for contact in the hands of the company. Indeed a long way since Jack Dorsey posted “just setting up my twttr” 3 years ago in 2006!

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