30 Predictions Of The Future For Twitter

The direction Twitter will go will be determined not just by ”Twitter” the company but by the market forces and its users and especially the trends in Social Media, Search and Social Search.

The emergence of Twitter Lists in the last few days is producing some interesting dynamics regarding influence real or perceived on Twitter.

Some obvious trends

• Its growing importance as a real time search engine and feed from its API to startups such as Sency, Topsy and OneRiot and of course Google and Bing.
• The growing use of Twitter to drive traffic to blogs and websites  .. Guy Kawasaki makes no apology when he says “I approach it as a broadcast marketing tool to help me make Alltop successful”
• Twitter is heading in the direction of more filtered and intelligent conversations not just inane chatter .. Brian Solis
• As a platform it is gaining credibility and this can be seen especially in it’s tougher approach on Spam as reported by Mashable, since it’s announcements of partnerships with both Google and Bing in recent weeks

Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur has some interesting and revealing and radical predictions … and though I don’t agree with all of them the future will be the real judge and jury.

1. Twitter will reach masses of people including friends
2. It will help you  in your business in lots of different ways
3. The general population will not use the same Twitter tools that early adopters are currently using
4. Status updates will be available across all Social Media platforms
5. We will laugh later when we look back at the time when we had to to go to each platform to update
6. Twitter will be dominant.. like a motherboard on a computer where we will plug applications into it
7. Social Graph will open up.. which means that you will be able export your friends to other platforms like LinkedIn.. at the moment it is quite closed
8. Twitter will be the place to go to get a real and personal idea of a person and how they think
9. Twitter will also be the site to visit and search and find out about a Company’s Brand reputation
10. Twitter will replace SMS for millions of people because it is
    • Portable and archives across devices
    • you don’t need to remember a phone number
    • You are not tied to a mobile operator
11. Twitter will replace chat for many people. A Direct message exchange is very similiar to a private chat and Twitter lists are very similiar to a public chat room
12. Location will be one of the top status updates( Like with Google Latitude – streaming live with friends).. also you be able to make it public to show your location
13. Private updates will be bigger then public updates- especially with location
14. Public eCommerce status won’t work because buying things for most people is very intimate they don’t want to share publicly that they bought a new car or shoes
15. Live reviews of any place like a restuarant or product via Twitter will become standard and we will get coupons as we enter a shop based on location
16. Promos by brands and retailers will have huge success for last minute deals
17. Web use of Twitter willbe a fraction of the mobile use of Twitter
18. Dating status updates will not be big on Twitter
19. Twitter will not display ads in your main feed as users will get too angry
20. There will be more devices publishing updates on Twitter than humans such as planes, cars wi-fi scales
21. Corporations will have entire teams devoted to Twitter and status updates
22. Hyperlocal (very local) news sites with Twitter’s Geotagging feature will be widely used
23. Google will have its own Twitter like platform and will not buy Twitter
24. There will be a few alternatives for niche search such as “Brand Monitoring”
25. Internal enterprise Twitter like services will become standard.. you will see many private Twitter lists within companies
26. Google and Bing will be the place you search for Tweets
27. Vertical Twitter apps will start to appear such as
    • Stock tweets that has already emerged and is popular
    • Fitness apps
    • Fashion apps
28. Twitter will remain mostly used outside of Twitter.com  such as platforms like Seesmic and TweetDeck
29. There will be less and less corporate speak and cover up in public events and government due to the increasing transpareny  from blogs and real time search such as Twitter it will be increasingly hard to lie
30. It will always be about you
    • Being yourself
    • Transparent
    • Being yourself

So what do you think is the future for Twitter?