Zetetic

A long time ago I read Neal Stephenson’s essay In the Beginning…was the Command Line, an absurdly fun romp through the evolution of the modern operating system (at least up until the time it was written, it’s a bit dated now), in which he compares Windows 95 to a crummy station wagon, classic Mac OS to a cheesy Euro-sedan, and Linux to free tanks that no one wants. It’s a kind of ode to a hacker’s love for good tools, and discusses how interfaces have evolved from the command line as their ancestor.

We here at Zetetic are still big fans of the command line, which makes sense given our line of work. We prefer many good tools that do simple things that we can link together to do very powerful things. That’s the legacy of many of the oldest command line tools that are still in heavy use today, and the driving aesthetic behind some emerging tools like Git. (If I’m speaking somewhat generally here, it’s because I wish to avoid alienating readers with grotesque demonstrations of piped UNIX commands ;-)

On the web this aesthetic seems to be driving a lot of innovation as many online services, including ours, are striving to be good at some very specific things and to offer easy integration points with related services. More and more, services are turning to Twitter to provide users with mobile features and access, which makes a lot of sense – not everyone can afford an iPhone, but almost everyone has text messaging capabilities in their pocket and a service like Twitter makes a useful transport (when it’s working).

And thus, we come full circle back to the command line, in the year 2008. How long will the honeymoon last? Hard to say, but I’m going to put my money on it being around until the next drastic change in how we physically interact with computers.

Those of us who are real big nerds and power-users tend to have keyboard shortcuts for everything and we like to avoid using a mouse to get around an interface quickly. We don’t want to go to the web to fill out a form and click ten things, we don’t want to navigate an interface with our fingers on our phone’s web browser.

What we want is to tell some service or system, in very short, simple terms, what to do for us. And if you’re like Stephen and I, you don’t really want to spell everything out, you want to provide just the barest amount of information needed so you can move on to the next thing.

We embraced this notion at Zetetic immediately when we first built PingMe, an interactive reminder service that provides a text based command line interface. In normal human-speak, you can send simple commands in a text message to create reminders while you’re on the go.

When building Tempo we saw that this capability was easily adapted to time entry. There are numerous ways to enter time with Tempo, but the most powerful, quickest, and probably the least understood so far is the command line. It’s a format of input that allows for mobile time entry by e-mail or twitter (giving you SMS and IM by extension), and it’s actually available in the web interface, too, shown below:

Instead of waiting for a web form to load and clicking through the interface, looking for what is desired, the user gets the immediate satisfaction of telling the system what’s up, but with only the text “1 hr design meeting in NYC @project @tag”. It’s faster, and there’s a sense of empowerment there. It’s like the difference between working within a bureaucracy and a small company. Less waiting around for everyone else, more personal responsibility. You don’t get a list of what tags or clients you have, but you already know because you use them all the time.

While folks aren’t flocking to the command line input form in our web interface, a lot of Tempo users are really taken with submitting their time entries over Twitter and E-mail, and are using this command line syntax. While I think we’re the first time tracking service to provide this kind of interface, we’re certainly not the only ones who think the idea is a good one, and that’s a good sign that we’re on the right track.

Over a year ago, when we were first putting together PingMe, a system not entirely unlike Twitter, we had a pretty good idea what the real potential was for a revenue model and how valuable it could be.

A few weeks back we posited these thoughts in public because the discussion of Twitter's likely potential for revenue keeps coming up in the blogosphere and it seems like everyone is missing the obvious: sticking small, meme-sized ads in the tweets themselves, based on context and relationships, and exploiting the nearly unbounded impression space. Nice to see somebody agrees with us about the context part of things, even though I think ReadWriteWeb is getting the means wrong.

I'm pretty sure that if Twitter started sending direct advertisements to their users, as opposed to embedded ones, they'd chase their users away to the clone services that are starting to emerge and which will mature. I don't think people will pay to subscribe to Twitter to escape the ads; when a service has been free for almost two years (a long time on the Internet), that kind of conversion is probably not in the cards (although not impossible). The potential revenue in just embedding ads is so high that I doubt they'd risk angering their user base with direct ads.

On top of that, it was a few months ago that some Tweets were arriving on my phone with an embedded ad for Twitter itself at the end of it, signaling, IMHO, that that would be the ad space in the future.

I should mention that since we started using our direct-embedding method in PingMe messages to briefly mention our other products and brands, we've yet to have any complaints from our users. You can't ask for better than that (well, aside from goal conversions).

Pay close attention - we're about to hand over an idea that could make Twitter...(drum roll, please)...ONE MILLION DOLLARS.

We saw this today on Tech Crunch (which has since been refuted):

Occasional ads in the Twitter timeline ... seems like the only real way to monetize Twitter, aside for premium subscriptions.

It's an interesting idea. We have long thought that the destined revenue model for Twitter is a new means of advertising where miniature ads will be injected at the end of Tweets.

Your messages on Twitter are restricted to 140 characters. This leaves 20 extra spaces, possibly a lot more with short tweets, before hitting the SMS limit of 160 characters. That reserve is perfect for advertising. We've been calling it meme-vertising and we've been doing it with our own service PingMe for well over a year - we use it to advertise our own services.

Here's how it works - we reserve 30 characters in every message that goes out, just enough space to jam a quick meme or ad in there. Anything goes, from "Keep Time with http://KeepTempo.com to "Real men of genius," if Budweiser decided to buy a block of impressions.

Unconvinced? Twitter's ad space would be virtually unbounded because the impressions are based on relationships, not page views. Consider that when Michael Arrington sends out one tweet alone, it could provide 13,104 impressions. In the end someone has to pay for a service, especially given the usurious cost of sending and receiving SMS messaging, and nothing stands a better chance of getting Twitter into the black than this virtually umlimited adspace that they possess.

We suggested last week that there's also money to be made offering business-level service and there is certainly revenue potential with putting ads in the timeline. Yet, I would wager that many Twitter users access the service with a third-party API client and wouldn't see them. I certainly don't think that Twitter would abuse their relationship with users by sending pure spam-tweets to your phone or device. We frankly can't see a better way for Twitter to make loads of money than to use the enormous advertising potential already present in its tweets.

Is it intrusive? To a degree. Although, in the year that we've been running PingMe we haven't had a single complaint, and I think you can see here how it can be done without being an eye-sore:

Note: we haven't yet taken on third-party advertisers for PingMe, but at some point we'd like to. Let us know if you're a local bar that might like to have "1/2 price drnx at Moe's 6-8" show up at the end of a reminder about "Happy hour with Frank tonight at 5."

We're on Twitter, too, follow us at: @billymeltdown and @ocskills