Twitter as a message router?

Twitter is fun, no doubt about it, but I think the novelty of it is starting to give way to some interest in finding ways to make it more useful. I had been thinking about it for a while (almost ever since I started using Twitter), but this post on their blog, pointing to Eric Meyer’s post got my wheels turning again. If Twitter had the notion of public and private posts (as Eric points out), it would be fairly trivial to do some interesting stuff with it.

It could be used as an input layer abstraction for various other web services I already use. For example, I could post something like “cal: lunch with Bob tomorrow 9am” from my mobile, and use a service like rssfwd to have posts routed to Gmail, where I could set up a filter that would forward it to 30boxes. If I happen to want to start using Backpack calendar instead of 30boxes, I probably rig up something similar. The key is that I would still create events using Twitter—only they would go to Backpack instead of 30boxes.

I could do something similar with notes that I want to send to my Backpack page or to Stikkit from my mobile. In essence, it could be used to add an SMS interface to apps that don’t already have one.

Similarly, it could be used as an delivery system for more useful things. For example, it might be interesting to setup a Twitter stream for team meeting reminders, that way the meeting could be scheduled on a single calendar, but a reminder could be broadcast via Twitter to all the team members who have added that private team meeting Twitter feed as a “friend”. Granted, that could be done by setting up an email group or alias, and using SMS gateways, but I think Twitter could present a much more elegant solution by abstracting away the particular calendar service being used. I think that’s just scratching the surface, too.

At it’s core, RSS is a message delivery mechanism, and Twitter puts a useful, near real time face on it. Who knows what the Twitter developers have in mind, but for an app that is about nothing, it sure seems like it has big possibilities.