Adaptive Path Blog

In his post yesterday, my colleague Dan pointed out some of Twitter’s flaws, including the potential of twitters to verge on banality, as well as cause attenuation conflicts. While I’ve been a fan of the service since launch, I’m not blind to those flaws. More than anything, I’m excited to see the evolution of the product — I’m waiting for all of these little bits of ambient data that Twitter shoots back and forth to resolve into something more meaningful.

Increasing the contextual value of Twitter messages should happen without impacting my normal use of Twitter; any changes should ideally dissolve into current behavior. I’ve been saying for a while that presence and status go together like chocolate and peanut butter — they combine to define part of your online identity. So why not simplify matters and get the systems I use to communicate them to work together?

I was thinking about this during SXSW, when I experimented with sending SMS to both Twitter and Plazes at the same time. I knew that if I sent “at casino el camino” to both systems, I could simultaneously let my friends know my status and log my location for my presence history on Plazes. Even better, the friends that I have on Plazes could query “Casino El Camino?” to Plazes SMS to see who else was there (without having to spam everyone on Twitter).

What I’d like to see is Twitter integrate some of how Plazes parses SMS, since it is already using a structured grammar to get valuable bits of context from the messages I send it. In full disclosure, defining the Plazes SMS user experience is the first portion of the work I’ve done with Plazes to launch. The team and I worked hard to make it both easy to use and extensible — it employs a grammar of “at”, “in” and “on” phrases to allow natural expressions of location. I believe that an integration effort between the two products would allow the Plazes’ parsing mechanism to listen in on my twitters, so that when I send “having a martini at Pony Bar” to Twitter, it could be parsed to pull out the location data. Even better, it could do so without requiring any change in how I normally write.

Of course, not every message would include an “at,” in” or “on” but the ones that did might contain a place that Plazes knows about, that it could log to its system and associate with my account. And there’s the value add for this integration — my normal behavior of broadcasting status now generates a presence stream that can be archived, queried, and used to help me coordinate my activities and interactions with my friends. For those who don’t want the service, simple options for turning location-parsing on or off should be implemented. To encourage people to use both services (and bring their communities closer together), I’d love to see both Twitter and Plazes adopt OpenID for sign in.

As we move away from overly-centralized collaboration and coordination tools, I’m encouraged to see lightweight platforms like Twitter and Plazes emerge and become popular. I believe the two provide naturally complimentary offerings, and any form of cooperation between them could benefit a whole host of users.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Collaboration, Communication, Experience design, Idealism, uncensored, Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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