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Noted VC Fred Wilson had a good post this morning, urging the Twitter community to get the creative juices flowing. He outlined five areas where additional growth would most likely occur.
Perhaps the most intriguing are the Enterprise and Vertical segments. Wilson references CoTweet, who merged with ExactTarget recently, and alludes to Chatter from Salesforce as the standouts thus far.That’s a strikingly bare bin considering Twitter launched almost five years ago.
If that activity points to anything, I think it’s that cumbersome CRM applications are quickly becoming a thing of the past. In some ways, the activity stream has replaced the CRM-based message.
Furthermore, if you look at the newer breed of social software entrants, much of their approach is rooted in lighter-weight tools and plug-ins – perfectly suited for Twitter’s API and evolving framework. Gone are the days of big back-ends and custom connector architectures. The mantra is loud and clear now — coexist and ease in to my enterprise accordingly.
Also, one enterprise company I thought was conspicuously absent in Wilson’s enterprise group was Yammer. It’s hard to point to another company that’s had as much influence inside corporations as Yammer. I think its recent push into customized communities (think external extranets) paints at least a partial picture of where things may be headed – a blurring of the lines between internal and external communities. That’s a huge opportunity that no one’s cracked that I’m aware of.
And I doubt anyone you know could name one vertical player in the Twitter ecosystem a la Stocktwits. It’s safe to assume one will likely emerge from advertising or marketing as social commerce continues to grow.
The real opportunities in that space will be helping brands harvest intelligence from the flurry of online engagement that will happen in distributed networks.
Below are Wilson’s five areas.
* Social Gaming – There have been a number of attempts to build social game experiences on Twitter. But I’m not aware of any successes of scale like we’ve had on the Facebook platform. I think we will see it emerge soon.
* Verticals – We have some successes to point to here like Stocktwits for finance and Flixup for movies but this is a wide open opportunity in most verticals and we haven’t seen as much effort here as I’d have expected.
* Enterprise – CoTweet comes to mind as well as the efforts that Salesforce has made to integrate Twitter. This is a huge opportunity.
* Discovery – This is one area where there is a significant amount of effort.Hunch, Listorious, TweetMeme, Cadmus, WeFollow, and MrTweet all come to mind.
* Analytics – While Twitter will obviously be delivering better analytics to its users, particularly its marketing and business users
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