The LAB: Innovating Twitter with S.I.T. (February 2012)
Twitter continues to evolve with some 220 million users tweeting collectively 250 million times a day. It is a vast social network that has become the world’s “listening post” for events happening everywhere. Major news organizations rely on Twitter to give early warning to breaking stories.
For this month’s LAB, we will apply all five techniques of Systematic Inventive Thinking to Twitter. Our goal will be to create new features and innovations with the main Twitter platform as well as to create completely new applications related to Twitter. Many “apps” tied to Twitter already exist, and you can find a thorough inventory here.
This is not the first time we have applied SIT to Twitter. See my March 2009 post about using the innovation method on how to monetize Twitter. Since then, not much has changed in their business model.
To use S.I.T., we start with the components of Twitter:
1. Profile
2. Photo
3. People followed
4. Followers
5. Hashtags
6. Tweets
7. Re-tweets
8. Groups
9. Search
10. Feeds
11. Client
12. API
We apply each of the five templates of S.I.T. one at a time to create new configurations. We work backwards to identify potential benefits or new markets with that configuration. In each example below, I apply a template and then try identify whether an app already exists. This is a way to check the validity of the templates to create new value: