The Future Twitter Account

Lot’s of people are busy talking about Twitter’s growth and their journey to profitability. There’s plenty of discussion about new features and lots of questions about business models, but nobody’s talking about what the future Twitter account might look like. I’ve got a few ideas, and they don’t bode well for Twitter’s business model.

If you follow me on Twitter you’ll know that I recently picked up a WiThings Scale. If you don’t, the WiThings scale is a scale with a wifi card built in. It automatically tweets out my weight every time I step on it. It even keeps shareable graphs of my weight so that everybody can see how Fat I’m getting. Since you’re all curious I’ll go ahead and share it here:

So what am I getting at? Well, my scale tweets. My foursquare account Tweets every time I check in somewhere. My Blippy account will soon Tweet every time I make a purchase. DailyBooth Tweets every time I upload a picture. Do you see where I’m going here?

A good percentage of my Tweets will soon be auto-generated by other services that I use. My Twitter account is taking “what are you doing” to the next level and not even requiring me to tell it what I’m doing. It just hooks into everything else and does the rest.

Twitter is becoming less of a social network and more of a social infrastructure. Entire new startups are popping up that use Twitter as an underlying platform. There’s a shifting trend away from using APIs and instead just hooking up services via twitter. It’s insanely easy to post to and read from Twitter, and posting publicly even builds more awareness for your application; so why not use Twitter instead of a private back end connection?

It won’t be long until a good percentage of everybody’s tweets will be auto generated from some other service. What will happen to Twitter then? Will we still monitor it the way we do now, or will we simply rely on some other application to pull in the data and filter it for us? I’m betting the latter.

It’s only a matter of time before everything in my house is Tweeting. The TV will tell you what I’m watching, iTunes will tweet what I’m listening to, Xbox will tweet my kill/death ratio in Call of Duty, and Graywolf’s oven will tweet what’s cooking and how long until it’s done.

In fact, I wonder how hard it would be to hook up a wifi card and volume displacement gauge to my Toilet…..

7 comments January 11th, 2010