To the title of this post, I was on a tech support call with AT&T/Apple this afternoon. Facing surprising SMS overage charges on my mobile account, I wanted to know if Twitter apps like Tweetie might be using the SMS channel to conduct their transactions. I figured not but the Tweetie site gave me no info.

So I asked the support person, who knew about Twitter (better than AT&T) but not about whether Twitter iPhone apps use SMS. She put me on hold to ask a support specialist. About 15 minutes later she came back with a reasonable response (”they probably don’t use SMS”) and a suggestion to talk to the app vendor.

All this had me thinking about the huge inefficiency at play with the responder trying to locate the specialist, get their attention and time, probably juggling multiple phone lines, to then give me one person’s measured response. I imagined a not-too-distant future where the call responder typed my query into a local Twitter-clone running on the tech support network inside AT&T/Apple. This query would immediately push out to subscribers – some required by their manager to subscribe to all tech support feeds, and others who just want to see the problems customers are encountering. I then imagined that some of these subscribers would run search filters on the messaging stream in order to be alerted to those queries they were most interested in tracking.

So somewhere in the bowels of tech support there’s a guy who is a Twitter power-user, or an engineer who wrote the SMS api’s, or a community developer that helps 3rd parties like Tweetie write iPhone apps… and they get pinged every time a tag of interest comes across the network. They see “iPhone Twitter SMS” and respond with the info. With enough of these transactions the call responder will have an archive of tech support tweets they can search through to see if someone has already responded. Of course, this archive provides another layer of analytic data that can be mined to get more info about the problem areas most often reported to tech support.

This concept isn’t particularly new. Businesses have been trying to do this with IM for years. The difference is that IM only gets you access to one person at a time and you have to think to contact them specifically. Then you get caught up in a conversation when you really just need an answer. The Twitter broadcast model quickly gets your query out to a pool of possible responders. Even more importantly, by subscribing to the posts of others throughout the business (eg sales, dev managers, support, evangelists, brand managers, etc…) employees extend their sensors out to include many more valuable inputs. Once they get beyond a certain size, most businesses inevitably Balkanize into distinct units that gradually build up walls and grow insular. Enterprise Twitter (for lack of a better term) would help dissolve these boundaries. This is especially critical in an age of convergence where even the most diverse businesses are feeling the need to integrate and build interoperability across their portfolios.

Again, enterprise Twitter isn’t a new concept but it’s one that so far seems to have escaped either the demand side of the equation – businesses (I’m constantly amazed by the deep endemic failures of communication within companies), who desperately need better & more efficient forms of internal communication; and the supply side, which remains unable to provide any sort of internal enterprise-grade broadcast messaging solutions.

[Updated: Check out Mike Gotta's note on Enterprise Version's of Twitter.]

It is important to acknowledge that Mozilla gets almost 90% of it’s revenue from Google search support. This power dynamic gives a lot of leverage to Google and positions Firefox as a potential Google proxy. I can’t help but think that Chrome may be little more than a dev sandbox and a foil to distract attention from the concerted effort between both parties to rewrite the web in their favor.

Perhaps more importantly to Adobe, the assumed competition between Chrome & Firefox obfuscates the very real & present strategy to get web video out of Flash and to further de-legitimize Flash and all “closed” 3rd party plugins against the rising value of HTML5. Both Google and Mozilla (Googlezilla!) are working to build canvas support into all browsers and to enhance the HTML5 spec to support rich media rendering. Likewise, the communications and positioning coming from both continue to stress the value of the “open web”, “interoperability”, and the danger of closed, 3rd-party plugins (ie Flash). Adobe will still claim a reasonable chunk of the rich web but if HTML5 (or whatever subset implementation Googlezilla gets into Firefox, IE, & Safari) allows easy rendering of HD video to any screen, they can say goodbye to Flash as a video solution.

Meanwhile, Google itself may find unexpected competition from an unlikely challenger. Erick Shonfeld at TechCrunch has posted a brilliant insight into the deep value of Twitter… and what it may mean for Google. It’s kinda mind-blowing to think that a hot-topic upstart like Twitter could pose a threat to the Googleplex, but Shonfeld nails it with his article, Mining the Thought Stream:

What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people..? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right now..? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine.

…In fact, the crude beginnings of this “now” search engine already exists. It is called Twitter…

He continues to note that search engines like Google capture people’s intent (what they are looking for), while Twitter captures their thoughts, and feelings, and what they’re doing. This is a new type of search model more closely joined to the real-time global mind. It’s much closer to people than Google search can get. Twitter is clearly already tremendously disruptive, even without any revenues. Imagine building search and analytics on top of it….

And yeah, everybody wants to know what Twitter’s business model is. Keep in mind that Twitter’s #1, Evan Williams, sold his earlier company, Blogger, to Google so he’s already got that channel open. If the model is to sell to Google and turn the world’s most successful web search engine into the world’s most powerful human thought & behavior probe, then yeah, you wanna keep that under wraps. Twitter will stay the same but Google search will suddenly get *a lot* smarter. If, on the other hand, Twitter seeks to challenge Google in search and analytics, then, oh damn you wanna play those cards as close to your chest as you can possibly keep them.