All tweets are not created equal
Clearly some tweets are more informative, entertaining, insightful, amusing or provocative than others. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discover these more valuable tweets as the usage of Twitter continues to grow.

Problems with Twitter search
Twitter search is one tool designed to help solve this problem but it is currently very basic as it only supports a default "most recent" sort for the results from a specific query. There are usually lots of low value tweets in this result set as the only requirement for a tweet to make the list was having been recently sent.

It seems that Twitter needs a better way to help the best tweets bubble up to the surface. I'm proposing that the way to accomplish this is to assign each tweet a value.

Just as a web page can be assigned a score so that Google can return the top match for a query it will become increasingly important for tweets to have scores so that people can find the most valuable tweet(s) on a topic. In other words, what is the equivalent of "page rank" for Twitter?

Implications of a tweet's value
The implications of being able to determine a tweet's value are powerful and include the following:

1. Tweet search can sort tweets for any term on value, not just timeliness.
2. A user can see any other user's most valuable tweets to help decide whether or not to follow.
3. Digests can be created to summarize the most valuable tweets for a given topic or a given time period.
4. Spam should get filtered out since it would have a very low value.

Next time: How to determine the value of a tweet?
In my next post I'll discuss what components should go into the value score for a tweet and how we might go about calculating this value.

Twitter is simply message passing
Up to this point, most of the messages on Twitter have been from human senders to human listeners. However, there is no reason that people should be the only agents who send and receive messages and in fact we are seeing the rise of services that replace humans on one or both of these ends.

Messages have lots of context
Services that receive messages on Twitter need to be able to parse the message for meaningful context and perform one or more actions based upon the content of the message. The more specific the service, the more specific the message needs to be. For example, search.twitter.com is a service which listens to every message and indexes the content of every message so that it is searchable. 'Trends' is a service built on top of this index that notices which terms are experiencing accelerations.

Message syntax conventions
It's not too difficult to extrapolate the growing usage of Twitter as a 'universal' messaging platform as certain conventions become widespread (e.g. beginning a message with a twitter id means a "reply", using a '#' symbol in front of a term indicates a tag) and new conventions are adopted. It is not too hard to imagine how even something like the unix pipe symbol ('|') might be utilized in Twitter to string messages along (e.g. "@nwa nyc tues am | @cal @bob 2pm") might use a service from Northwest Airlines to schedule a flight for you on Tuesday morning. Northwest might then pass the result of their service (perhaps a confirmation code, flight number and time) to the next service in line -- a calendar. That service would add the flight info to your calendar as well as send an invitation to @bob to meet at 2pm on that day.

Conclusion
Twitter's popularity growth has certainly benefited from people using it as a way to pass messages among themselves but the service will become indispensable as more people discover useful services which can be invoked by a simple message yet which can perform powerful actions on the user's behalf.