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Toronto TacosThe next evolution of twitter
Today I was cruising my twitter feed and it dawned on me that the next step in the evolution of the whole micro-blogging stream, is substreams.
Let me explain – twitter is an all or nothing deal, when you subscribe to someones twitter feed you see everything they are publishing. As of right now there is no way to filter the information easily. I know you can create a specific search on the client side of things, but I’m talking of this kind of functionality on the server side. Users can also create different twitter accounts for the different kinds of information you want to post. A great example would be TravelAlerts which is a travel deals website that has multiple twitter accounts for different cities in Canada; one for Toronto, one for Montreal and so on.
What if there was a way to create 1 twitter account – TravelAlerts, then in there was the ability to subscribe to multiple substreams users can Follow, TravelAlters[Toronto], TravelAlerts[Montreal]. I would imagine that you could subscribe to either the full stream from TravelAlters if you’d want to see all tweets from all their substreams, or alternatively you can pick and choose which substream to subscribe in a-la cart style.
The admin wouldn’t be very hard at all either, as your tweeting I would imagine a drop down to select which substream you’d want to target the tweet, if you don’t select one then it would just be a global tweet all main stream and substream subscribers would get. For example I want to announce there is a contest coming up for TravelAletrs and it is Canada wide, and I want to reach all my followers, not just Toronto, Montreal etc followers. I would write the tweet with no specific substream target, and because it has no target, the tweet would go out to everyone, regardless of their substream following. With this model it would be very easy to get the attention of all followers, while maintaining 1 consistent account and targeting multiple users specific needs as well.
This seems to me like the next step for twitter, and I am sure many people would love to cut down the amount of accounts they would need to maintain. On top of that, you can have multiple substreams but still have the ability to call out to all of them with global messages. Some examples of services that could use this substream idea would be GameSpot [Ps3, Xbox, Reviews etc], Real Estate [250-300k in Toronto, 300-450k in Montreal etc..] and BestBuy [TV, Music etc..], they could leverage the multiple streams to target the people they want, on top of that you could get some Return On Investment on the data returned – seeing how many people subscribe to a certain substream, and catering ads to those people.