What's Twitter - Om Malik's Salon.com Post

Is Twitter the 'killer app' that gets us to a Semantic Web?

At its core, this seemingly innocuous app is our collective consciousness made digital; a powerful, interconnected stream of thought, observation and exchange - from the mundane to profound - unfolding real time on our screens.

A plethora of tools now increasingly enables us to find, edit and direct our I/O from this vast, laced cacophony and individually tailor which elements of the stream we wish to draw from, or engage. And this is just the beginning.

Last week, Pete Cashmore, of Mashable retweeted: Is Twitter the most important site since Google? (from Chris Bennett’s 97th Floor blog: http://www.97thfloor.com/blog) Perhaps ‘most important’ status has not yet been attained. But the seeds are there.

As Twitter’s base reaches critical mass (has this already happened?) and the platform matures, this fledging app may mark the coming of age of the Semantic Web – or 3.0. Last year, Alex Iskold of ReadWriteWeb theorized it will take a ‘killer app’ to get us there – one ‘layering an understanding of semantics on top of a consumer application so cool and so viral people will be open to making the shift to semantic technologies’. I posit we’ve found that app in Twitter. While the Twitter of today doesn’t meet semantic web criteria, it has access to vast shared knowledge, and is fueled by mass connectivity - key elements for taking 3.0 from niche to mass-market reality.

Twitter provides a near-perfect opportunity to add a layer of intelligence to our digital collective consciousness. Surely some bright minds and attuned VCs have already connected the dots.