Is Twitter Still Interesting?

Is Twitter still interesting?  I think that is a legitimate question.  I’m not asking if people are still using the service (because they are), what I am asking is if Twitter is up to anything interesting and what they are planning to do for the web.  Twitter was always expected to blow our minds with realtime information.  Many people speculated Twitter would become a search engine, to which, I put Twitter up against a mainstream success test.  Twitter has definitely grown by leaps and bounds, but their traffic did slow down for a period of time.  However, I should note it appears according to the latest Compete information it’s picking up a bit.

Twitter is no doubt popular, but now with an advertising business that we were supposed to be wowed by and an ad platform that we would love, I can honestly say it wowed me at all (at least not yet).  Twitter’s announcement of promoted tweets, sponsored trending topics, and now their latest attempt to monetize the EarlyBird account (which will tweet out special deals from their partners) are all good ideas, but are they truly revolutionary in the way people were expecting from Twitter?  Is any of this truly interesting?  It’s not new, it’s not special, it’s what we would expect to be done.

Perhaps we put too much hype into Twitter and are being now slightly disappointed.  I really don’t know.  I think it would be interesting to see Twitter in search – that would be interesting, especially if they created an algorithm to rank tweets (not just based on retweets).  What if Twitter were to launch an AdWords/AdSense type platform?  That would be of interest.  Granted it’s not a completely new idea, but there is definitely more that could be done with a Twitter version of it then Google’s doing or can do currently.

Twitter also seems to integrate well with events, such as, the most recent World Cup and the team pages so you could follow your favorite team(s).  Of course, Twitter suffered from a lot of downtime due to the huge amount of traffic, which wasn’t very helpful.  At this point you would think they would have figured out.

What do you think?  Is Twitter interesting anymore?  Again, I’m not talking about for promoting your stuff and talking to friends, customers, etc.  I’m asking if Twitter have done anything lately (or ever) that has truly wowed you?