Despite all of its recent up-time troubles, Twitter's growth has been on a tear lately. According to Google Ad Planner data, time spent is off the charts at a staggering 550 seconds per user in the US and 560 seconds globally. Compare those figures to 480 seconds per user for CNN - a site that's at least 10 years older. In addition, as you can see from the chart below, daily unique users are skyrocketing as well.
As Twitter's audience grows more companies are starting using it to engage its user base. In essence this turns the site into a service and fosters innovation. For example, I love how the Los Angeles County Fire Department is using Twitter for news distribution.
Some have wisely suggested that utility computing is a potential business model for the micro-blogging service. This is already happening perhaps more than meets the eye. For example, Mindmeister, the online mindmapping tool, uses the Twitter API to power it's SMS alerting capabilities. Therein lies the issue. If Twitter makes a change to the API, which it did yesterday, then it impacts anyone who uses it. As a result, Mindmeister was forced to make changes to the way it handles notifications.
The takeaway here for me is that as fantastic as web services are, many of them are controlled by one party and are thus a single point of failure. If they go down or the particular site makes a change to the web service call, it can potentially ripple through the Internet economy if the API is popular.
So, mashup, develop and go nuts with APIs - but always proceed with caution becuase the rug can be pulled out from under you as it was for Mindmeister.
