Greg Verdino’s Twitlash today comparing Twitter’s popularity—and potential future—to Second Life’s, hit home for me. Both are geeky, avatar-driven, overhyped, buggy marketing magnets. And, as Verdino says, both will soon be “last year’s story”:

If your social media consultant is telling you that you absolutely must have a Twitter strategy, you need to have security escort them out of your building.  Immediately.  You don’t need a Twitter strategy.  You didn’t need a Second Life strategy.  In fact, there is no such thing as a Twitter or Second Life strategy.  Both of these things — along with the dozens of other emergent media options marketers can choose from — are at best tactics.  At worst, they’re just enabling technology platforms.  They might have a place in your marketing strategy, but none of these things are the strategy in and of themselves.

As marketers, business people and just plain old people, we need to look beyond the story (”hey everyone, shiny new thing here”) to find the story behind the story (”we are staring into the eye of a significant new truth.”) …Twitter itself doesn’t matter (at least it doesn’t matter much.)  What matters is the rising propensity of people to publicly share even the most minute details of their daily lives, the shift from the asynchonous connectivity of traditional social networking to the real time connectivity of presence, and the rising expectations among even a relatively small subset of consumers that everything from information to service to support to access can (and should) be delivered instantaneously.  The real story lies somewhere in that rambling sentence, I think.  Try not to miss the tworest for the twees (sorry – see point #5.)

Bravo: finally, another Twynic (Twitter cynic) who’s not falling for hypey Twitterrhea. (I’ll stop with the cornball Twitter vocabulary now.)

What Second Life and Twitter have most in common, as Verdino says, is that they are both

built around the concept of virtual presence. Sure, they approach presence from entirely different angles, but they are both presence-oriented applications and really only come to life when they are populated by people having real-time conversations.  Looking at this through a business lens, when H&R Block began dispensing tax advice on Twitter and offering people the opportunity to ’sit’ with a tax advisor in Second Life (both programs were piloted in 2008), they were really just testing two variations on the same theme — the ability of a company to use new technology to have real-time conversations with its customers.

And here’s where I think Verdino (who I agree with), and most of the Twitterati (whose enthusiasm bites me), run off the rails. Twitter is indeed part of a revolution of real time communication (see also Nick Carr’s nice piece on this last week after Zuckerberg announced that FB was now embarked on a realtime mission).  As I see it, Twitter is simply the bleeding edge of a tsunami of realtime technologies that are about to hit us. It’s  elementary  “presence technology.” Pick your time frame (3/5/10 years) but soon, ubiquity-based IP-based communications will be part of every appliance and datastream. That microphone you speak into at a panel: think of it as having realtime embedded IP communication abilities. Your every utterance will be instantly (or near instantly) communicated and scraped to the massive web-enabled audience. Every dictum that leaves your mouth will be scrapeable and mineable, hashtags or not. (Hashtags being nothing more than author metadata.)

Ubiquity rocks

Now think of other appliances that will get realtime, ubiquitous communication ability. (Sorry, RFID doesn’t count.) What about your toaster-oven, water faucet and refrigerator, estimating the caloric realities of your food intake (and letting you know when you’ve exceeded your daily limit of carbs or haven’t drunk enough water)? What about your car, capturing speed and fuel and driving habits, (with instant feedback on mpg, better driving skills, and directions)? What about your guitar, capturing your rhythmic and harmonic aptitude, (and letting you know different rhythmic shapes and chord alternations as you play)?

And now what about your software: Movies that can be scrubbed scene by scene, and metatagged (word by word or by character or scene—I saw a demo of this at BRITE last week). TV news that can be mined and tagged. And of course your voice mail. (Ooops, that happened today.)

The revolution of presence technologies isn’t about pure disintermediated information, but rather, as John Seely Brown said in The Social Life of Information, information that simply and completely incorporates the “social periphery.” This is already happening, albeit only through software right now: For example, Hulu announced new social networking tools this week that, according to the WSJ, let users “create online profiles and share videos with each other. For example, the Hulu “Scorecard” will let users track their activity.” (Kind of meh but what do you expect from NBC/Fox?) What you’ll want is all that good Twittability here, plus instant voting for trust, credibility, relevance, etc., —not to mention total integration with other web-based data. (You get some of this today on Boxee.) One of my first tweets was “Can haz friendbar 4 TV?”—I want two way real time commnications with all my networks at once, with no distinction between IP and cable TV—and daily I’m beginning to think it’s on its way, and a lot sooner than expected.

The key takeaway here for marketers and product developers is to develop tools with an eye towards helping realtime groups do what they already do in real life: what John Seely Brown (in his terrific The Social Life of Information) called the “social periphery”: all that edge stuff that people do in conversation that usually gets swept under the rug—simple talk, gesture, and informational nuance conducted through the cloud. Twitter is the beginning of that real time, real life social periphery as a mass movement, but it’s just the beginning of the story. As Verdino says, Twitter, like Second Life, may be “last year’s story” very soon now.

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