eran’s posterous

Over the weekend, I whipped up something kinda cool. A twitter account called @EventsInSF. Using Dapper and some php I've created a service that aggregates local events happening in San Francisco and the bay area and streams them into this Twitter account. It's kinda cool, and it seems to be useful to at least 50 people so that's great. But I think it's a signal of something much bigger.
Up until now, everyone were highly fixated about the "man-to-many" nature of Twitter, making it the greatest platform for celebs, PR people and immersing in the collective meme bath. @EventsInSF is, I believe, one of the first examples I'm aware of when a machine has a Twitter "persona" and is directly communicating with people on Twitter. As such, Twitter is a great content distribution channel as it takes care of the scaling. From my perspective, the same amount of resources are required to run @EventsInSF whether it has 50 followers or 500,000. How about that for good scaling?

However, there's something even deeper. What if machines will start talking to other machines using Twitter as their RPC platform? What if someone will build a service that will "follow" my @EventsInSF account and map those events as part of a travel mashup? Even better, what if it will send out commands, not only simple content? This loosely coupled nature of the Twitter "follow" motif and its close to real-time nature, are just perfect for it becoming the back-bone of autonomous machines talking to eachother over the web.

There still remains the issue of "service discovery". One could easily envision Twitter accounts being used as "directory services", or in fact using Twitter's search as a way for a machine to discover existing services of a certain type, holding certain content.

So what is my only issue with this rosy picture? It's the fact that Twitter is a service built inside a single company, that has full control over how people are using it. Envision a world without e-mail. Now think today someone will come up with this cool idea of a one-to-many push idea and name it "Twiemail". How comfortable would you be living in a world where there's that company that is the sole proprietor of your main way of communicating with people, and can ban you out any minute, censor your messages or what not? Why are we still comfortable with it when it's "one-to-many pull" rather than push?

Comfortable or not, Twitter will become a main channel for communication not only among us humans, but also for the machines that will supersede us. In a sense, as we're getting nearer in bringing the semantic web vision into life with services like Dapper, the time is getting ripe for a popular "glue" service to become the bus of the semantic web. Twitter could be just that.