SearchEngineZ - News and Ideas

There has been lots of talk lately about Twitter, TinyURL, and other URL shortening services. To me the solution is obvious....

• Twitter develops their own URL shortening service. Shouldn't be hard, such scripts can be purchased for $10...
• Twitter adjusts their software, so that when they check the length of any tweet, the first URL is counted as just 7 characters
• URLs embedded in tweets just appear like this uGT5ER7 - with the u denoting it is a Twitter short URL
• If Twitter also launched a browser toolbar, with a big button for Tweet This Page, which automatically embedded a short URL for the page you are visiting, then the process is complete

By doing so, Twitter could gather data on which pages online were being tweeted the most, and the click through rate.

Labels: twitter

This week Facebook changed the focus of their layout, making it more to do with updates. At the same time, my friends (not exactly early adopters) started updating twice as often. Given that Facebook is one place to achieve everything, and that they easily have the ability to create an interface to use it via mobile phones, I predict that Twitter has peaked.

Not far behind will probably be the IM services, such as Yahoo Messenger. If they know what is good for them, they'll add in the ability to broadcast updates. My Microsoft Messenger already broadcasts the song I am currently listening to, so it can't be hard.

Both IM servies and Facebook can tweet in ways superior to Twitter, and have many more existing users, and are not under pressure to find a revenue model. I predict that Twitter's number of users will peak on or before May 2009, and this time next year you will not be hearing Twitter mentioned at all, not even in tweets.

Labels: facebook, IM, twitter