Now that the internet age has started to crawl into the days of web troika, the idea of created a social mashup is an interesting one. There are so many tools that are centered around Twitter, it makes me a little nervous.
Don't worry about what happens when the servers fail, what happens if Twitter goes away? A lot of small ventures have been formed around the success of Twitter. As my boss likes to say, only 10% of people on the internet use it.
Why not created something in the spirit of Twitter. As my graduate poetry professor said, "Minor poets borrow. Great poets steal."
Why not take the qualities that made twitter popular - mobile accessibility and brevity - and integrate that into a product.
There are a few people out there doing that - and I don't mean direct Twitter competitors like Plurk. The one that comes to mind is ZapTag.com.
ZapTag is a place where you can vent your road rage about drivers. It has the same trappings of a social network, the brief messaging of Twitter, social media tagging and the integration of Google maps. A social media mashup.
It is not an important website, but some of the comments are hysterical. My current fav is "The red, octagon-shaped sign the person in the glowy vest was holding said STOP. If you can't wait two seconds to let a bunch of kids cross, try leaving your house earlier."
Some are interesting from a legal standpoint because they have busted people who hit and run - "Hit and run. Too bad he does not realize that I have pictures of him and his car."
Mostly, I like seeing that someone else built a functionality that applies brief messaging that was not built on the Twitter API.
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