Lately I have been hooked on many cool check-ins applications. Far from LBS, check-ins have invaded every other aspect of our lives. And slowly but surely, I see how my twitter is transforming from structure-free content into a more organized yet boring stream. 

As cool new apps appear, is the future of twitter to become a simple check-in agreggator? 

Twitter changed all of our lives. It brought the power of communication to every corner of the world. Simplicity of use was the key. Have something on your mind? Write it down in 140 characters or less. But simplicity on the front, meant complexity of data behind. Twitter is a powerful database of content, ready to mine. But mining and interpreting content from Twitter is not as easy as you'd think.

Let's do it the hard way

I've only seen a few companies do this really well. One of them is ffflick, a company that was acquired by Google this year. They provided ratings for movies based on people's tweets. They developed a great sentiment analysis engine that mixed up with some machine learning allowed them to process 100,000s of tweets. As you see, not the easiest thing to do.

Any other way? The Alternative

If we think about it, a tweet is nothing but a reality check-in. What are you doing? The only problem is that it's got no structure. I know! Let's do this:

1 - We'll break content down into pieces

2 - Let's give the user the chance to choose the pieces separately

3 - Then we can put the pieces back together - giving it a story-like mode

4 - And publish this in twitter. It will have great feel and it serves our purposes. TOTAL WIN

There's only one problem, how the hell do we structure content? Have you see a typical tweet? There is no structure!

Wait, I know! Let's pick a niche, an actionable market, where the structure is defined by ONE KEY VERB.

Barrage of new apps, some examples:

Foursquare: I am at

Hashable: I introduce you to / I just met

Soundtrckr: I am listening to

Blippy: I just bought

Miso: I am watching

All of these applications have applied this method with much success. They have simple yet great user interaction.And now the structured data adds great value to all parties and allows for great depth of community engagement. I'm so in love with this method.

Actually, before most of these came out, I was trying to apply this to my last mobile startup, Lowffer (much in the way Blippy adds user content, but without credit card swiping). Yet, an executive decision lead us into complete free-flowing content, which IMHO was a massive error. Time will see.

The Future...

...holds as many new apps with check-ins as you can imagine. I believe that most of them will follow the structured way of creating and then presenting content within Twitter. Some people say that structured content kills the spirit of twitter; others say that it makes content easier to manage making it more engagable. 

What do you think? Have you noticed this behavior in your twitter stream? Do you prefer structured or free flowing content?

Will Twitter become "just a" media platform that aggregates structured content from other sites?