A new “menace” for Twitter goes around. According to the NYT, TechCrunch and WSJ Google wants to add “social features” to its email service GMail.
Will this be the “Twitter Killer”? Didn’t Facebook try the same?
But what makes Twitter so special anyway?
Isn’t it just another way to communicate on the internet? I think we should drop the idea that Twitter is the only 140 char messaging service on the globe over board and start to see it as something global like email and SMS.
Even today it is in most cases impossible to get your own name on Twitter because like every provider it’s built on first come, first served basis. There is only one twitter.com/kirstenwinkler and every Kirsten Winkler after me has to take her name with – or _ or 9 or what ever.
So what if there were multiple providers for 140 char messages like for email. You could choose the one which still offers your name or which has some features Twitter doesn’t and so on. I mean I don’t want to tell you the story of email providers here. But imagine you could follow people on other platforms and integrate them naturally to your Twitter stream, @ reply them or DM them. Like you send emails from your Gmail account to Hotmail.
I think the pie is big enough, just like for email services and mobile phone providers. And as always, concurence drives innovation, right? So what if Twitter would just become one provider amongst many for 140 char messages?
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