Stardust Global Ventures

A few days ago I posted Part 1 of these thoughts here. If you haven’t seen it already, it’s a good starting point to put things in context.Put simply, I put on my business development hat and asked myself the question “If I were deploying a strategy to monetize and extend Twitter, what would I go explore?”

If I had a hand in strategic partnerships at Twitter, here are a few more business areas and strategic alliances I’d explore. We’ll see if I give you five more solid ideas here.

Google Latitude & Twitter Integration – Clearly, in web space, Google is the 800 pound gorilla. Cisco and Microsoft are also big gorillas, but they’re in another cage. The single biggest problem with an 800 pound gorilla is they often come with a two ton ego. Google has plenty of them. The Google gang is in many ways like Gene Wilder and Richard Prior in Stir Crazy – walking through the halls, strutting their stuff – “That’s right. We bad!” Ok, so Google’s big and bad. They’re also flawed and crushable just like any monolith. They do a fabulous job of partial innovation. They’re great starters. Great thinkers. And great implementors…up to a point. What, you doubt me?

Jaiku, remember them? Lifestreaming of the highest order at its peak. Google bought it for the talent and let the technology, which was a precursor to FriendFeed with location awareness long ago, slip into the void. Jaiku is still alive, but it’s on life support at best. User provided life support because Google pretty much pulled the plug. (We could go on to Grand Central a la Google Voice, but that’s an acquisition integration faux pas we’ll save for another time.)

Wait a minute…location awareness. We’ve heard that term recently. Google did something in that area with something called Latitude not too long ago. Awesome potential. But let’s think about it. My location is great. Our networks can see where we are. We’ve actually used it and had friends call, text and otherwise message us. But how does Latitude integrate with Gmail? Gtalk? Oh, that’s right. It doesn’t. It provides a link to call or text. But my friends are international and I want to Twitter DM them, not send expensive SMS. (Aside: Is Google in the mix to drive up carrier SMS revenue, or providing a user service? It would be interesting to know the relationship between Google and the carriers.)

Twitter needs to kick in the front door on Building 43 at the Googleplex and get hustling on integration with Google Latitude. And both companies need to be open about it and talk up what they’re doing…maybe on Twitter. Twitter just picked up some talent from Google. Is that a portent of things to come, or cannablization? If these two aren’t already working together in secret (a bad idea), they need to get together in public. The leadership teams need to kiss and hold hands in public and send a message to the rest of the wannabe crowd that the competition is stepping up a notch…or ten.

Twitter Search – search.twitter.com is nice. Just nice. It’s user generated tagging. The tags are simply fuel for indexing a database to search more efficiently. Twitter lacks metadata of real power, at least today. Facebook has the real power of metadata with all the demographic and personal information we share. But Twitter makes ineffective use of the metadata it does have. The search engine and metadata surrounding traffic needs work, and that means partnerships.

First Twitter needs to expand the profile information users can provide so they can gather metadata that has dollar value behind it. What they have today has zero dollar value. Broaden scope. And do it this week. Every day lost is a day that every service with more valuable metadata gets farther ahead.

How do we do that in some new and creative way? Partner. Who of the big search engines should Twitter be paired up with, tied and the hip, perhaps even conjoined? Hmmm, well Google comes to mind.

‘Nuff said.

Buy Hollywood – Bear with me as we flesh this one out. It’s a bold move, but @ev and @biz need to be bolder.

This whole conversation about Twitter ideas got fueled a bit yesterday with some of my friends on
Twitter and through some things Sheryl was reading online. Here’s one thing I said yesterday -

Why should Twitter kowtow to the old world media when new media…now media is on the rise?

Oprah made a huge splash on Twitter last week. Why? For the cost of a good Harpo productions movie her team could deploy the same or better infrastructure as Twitter and launch a private Oprah.Net. Why not take it over first and offer it to stars as a service, providing cross platform integration with the public Twitter we know and love today.

Now take another celebrity who does get social media – Ellen. Why not go offer her Ellen.Net too. And why not leap to Kutch.er for Ashton and his million followers.

The next step is to provide linkage between the heirarchies. Users who only want to follow one can do so. Those who want to belong to all the nets, can do so. Post to one, several or all.

How hard is this technologically? Not very. As a technical exercise, that’s all it really is…an exercise. What seems to be missing is a champion to make things happen and the business cases to win the game. There’s nobody driving this particular effort that we Twitterholics can see. Twitter remains just a tool for the media stars. A tool that costs nothing. Not a freaking dime to use. Twitter is leaving money on the table.

Stop doing that!

While we’re thinking about it, Twitter is, as @shelisrael said, modeling clay, being shaped by the users. It’s time to embrace a new reality. Twitter isn’t Web 2.0 and never was. Web 2.0 was a bad dream. Twitter stands on the cusp of redefining the Information Age to be something else…the Interactive Age. That’s how the era we live in will be remembered. Twitter can define the Interactive Age, or leave that to someone else. I think we’re up to that challenge.

There’s eight or so, and I said I’d give you ten. I’ve decided to stop here. I don’t get paid for this, and I should. @ev … @biz … you don’t call. You don’t answer my tweets. I’m @kencamp. My number’s public. We really should talk. Some people are listening, and you’re missing out on the conversation.

Technorati Tags: Twitter, monetization, @ev, Evan Williams, @biz, Biz Stone, Information Age, Interactive Age