11:48
aaronchua
i) Startup Idea #109: 6 Twitter ideas
ii) How do we create better conversations?
iii)Twitter is cooler when it becomes mainstream
iv)Twitter as social VRM: a big idea
Beyond this, there are tons of interesting ideas from the Web. Here is a list of what I have found to be the most relevant. Most of them are related to Twitter but can be applied to micro blogging in general. Note that those with * denotes my favorites.
1a. TweetSense
John Battelle's idea on force fitting Google's adsense model into Twitter. Will it work? Probably in the short term but as its costs overwhelms the benefits, we will more likely see marketing as described in (1b) below:
Marketers can play, both on Twitter (imagine a cars.twitter.com, with auto advertisers on the right rail and at the top, perhaps using contextual TweetSense - yes, it's owned, by...), and off (think about a feed of contextual Tweets and TweetSense next to conversational sites like Digg and, well, millions of others, as well as sites created simply from Twitter feeds on popular hashes...)
1b. Twitter as next generation marketing platform (hat tip to Ethan Bauley)*
Twitter has the potential to enable brands to build real value for users. The opportunity is to layer additional value services on top of its communication protocol. Brands need the publishing tools necessary to better target and more richly cultivate a conversation with their audience via this viral, decentralized and spam-free messaging/marketing channel.
2 A wordpress for micro blogging*
Group size matters a lot in social media. If we gain the ability to change group sizes in micro blogging, we can potentially see more kinds of social innovations. What happens when millions of micro blogs/comunities can be installed easily in anywhere?
Bonus: what would happen if a billion micro blogs is being applied in mobile? Will it change the way we communicate?
3. Products that Twits
Then there's the thought of our products telling us when they need things; cars needing servicing is something we have already, refrigerators needing replenishing is something that's often talked about.
4. Data driven ideas powered by Twitter
I could see models around Twitter news, traffic, weather, product information, dating (why hasn't that one been done yet??), politics... How about using twitter to actually power my newsreader, or go back the other way and use my RSS feeds to power Twitter user recommendations based on people who are tweeting the articles I read?
5. Mirco exchange for Twitter
Think of a situation where you want to exchange something of micro-value - but it’s just too inconvenient or socially awkward to actually do anything about it.
6. Tool for publishing financial research*
A good opportunity for somebody to build a lightweight blogging platform for analysts to democratize the financial research business. Twitter will be the default tool for publishing and community building.
Many if not most top sell-side research analysts will leave to set up their own shops, and leverage lightweight, flexible technologies for publishing and disseminating their research.
7. Dating service for Twitter
Basically, it’s just a big database that collects information on people that want to use @TwitterDating and then matches up people based on their supplied personal information and a magical contextual analysis of people’s last 1-2 pages of tweets to create potential matches.
8. Twitter for business connections
I think it is more potent for business connections, interest groups and flash invites to targeted events (tied to a mobile LBS). All of this, of course, is based upon the availability of real working software that delivers accurate text analysis.
9. Building better services on Twitter to assess social capital*
Enabling connections to build up one's social capital is going to be a very important business enabler for the 21st century. Twitter is primarily a publishing platform. You can extend your social capital on it but it takes effort. Some smart entrepreneurs can build easier to use services for us to amplify our social capital.
The more techniques we can design to make accessible social capital the better off we’ll all be.... Twitter are great platforms for this kind of work, but I’d like to see someone build something on top of those services to make connections even easier to make.
10. Better conversation filters for Twitter
Related to (9) is our inability to organise conversations. In real life, our conversations are rich, multi-dimensionally and integrate entertainment, facts, opinions, news etc into a coherent whole. All these are lost in the way our conversation tools have been built. This is the opportunity to develop something that better organises our conversations.
There is, however a natural part of our humanness that wants to discern who is talking to whom and what they’re saying. It’s a big part of what Social Media is all about but we’ve lost our way in a world of widgets, wikkis and web-apps.The apps today just aren’t able to filter and sort conversations yet.
11. Twitter as favor bank*
This is one of the few attempts I have seen of creating business models around attention markets. Twitter is such a market and this is an innovative attempt.
Every minute or so, there are several Twitter users asking their followers to “Please RT” a link they tweetted about, whether it is to promote an event, an widget, some marketing offer, or to find someone.This favor might be worth a lot, considering that many Twitter users have 1000s or 10,000s of followers. One way that Twitter users could earn something would be through a favor bank, or in this case a Retweet bank or Tweetbank for short.
12. Translation tool for Twitter*
We often forget that language is one of the biggest barrier to a global conversation. If diversity is key to creativity and innovation, then the ability to hear different voices is going to be a killer.
Someone should make a twitter app that translates your updates to other languages... so you can follow people who speak a different language.
13. Local search
Imagine using Outside.In mechanism for organising local information and applying to Twitter.
Almost everything on Twitter is inherently local. The simple question “What are you doing?” implies that because, unless you are at home watching TV, you are doing something that is local, whether that is local to you or to someone else.
14. Twitter as a time bank
The goal of the Twitter Time Bank is to allow people to bring the reality to the idea that “time is money”, and allow anyone to issue their own time-based money they can use to pay others for products/services or to donate to others.
15. Opening up miro blogging to designers*
This is beyond making a pretty site. Opening up the design elements in micro blogging gives creative people the ability to shape different forms of communities. That is necessary if we want to see a blossom of diversity in micro blogging.
Breaking the rendering into as many componenets as necessary to give designers over the appearance of a site... it is time to open it up so that all the creative people can have a go at it.
Posted in: microblogging,startup business ideas
