Twitter is the Real Deal – You Watching AAPL?
Dropped by my first Mobile Meet Up SF tonite in South San Francisco. Overall seems like a good event — heavy on the developer front, not necessarily “investor friendly” in that the discussion is pretty deep on product (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and less focused on the business aspects of the presenters and their potential funding needs. Of course, this was the only one I’ve been to, so perhaps tonite was a special case due to the focus on Twitter.
After sitting through a handful of mini presentations from early stage companies, the big takeaway is that Twitter is fast becoming a significant part of the Internet ecosystem. They are thinking smartly about how to embrace the developer community — enabling all types of services to be built on top of Twitter in a way that increases the importance of Twitter not just to early adopters but ultimately every day Internet users.
Based on a sampling of tonite’s presentations Twitter is getting some early traction from developers. A quick run down of a couple of the examples that were showcased this evening:
- Mosio is a mobile community that enables questions and answers — their interesting implementation is on Twitter at twitter.com/qna. Once you’re signed up at mosio and you start following twitter.com/qna you can ask questions and get answers from the Twittersphere.
- Twittelator is a do it all Twitter app — hard to even explain all of the things it enables you to do in concert with Twitter…I would recommend downloading it if you have an iPhone and just start banging around on it.
- TwitterFon is a slick iPhone Twitter app that enables a robust set of Twitter functionality on the iPhone, while TwitterFox (from the same developer as TwitterFon) is a FireFox plugin that lets you track your Twitter feed from the friendly confines of FireFox browser.
- TwitPic — This is the Flickr of Twitter …embedded in to multiple Twitter clients, they got a server crushing boost after the US Airways plane landed in the Hudson last month. And the guy running it — Noah — is a hoot!
Oh, and one other thought from tonite’s gathering: Apple may want to throw it’s hat in the “who’s gonna buy Twitter” ring if they haven’t already. Beyond the obvious driver Twitter would be in iPhone handset sales, the real potential upside for Apple would be in Twitter’s ability to bring Apple in to the media business — the new age media business.
If Twitter becomes the conduit through which users communicate, publish and access content, and they do this on the iPhone, well…AAPL at under $100 may be a major bargain right now?
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