In the most recent Hypios blog article, “Is Twitter an Ponzi Scheme?” Jérémie talks about the Twitter life-cycle saying that users first get involved as listeners and recipients of content; then they start retweeting and generating content, and finally they get to follow so many people that they cannot really follow what’s going on and start using bots and automatic tools for posting and promoting their content. His concern is that if we continue that way, we may end up on a Twitter where nobody listens anymore, and machines tweet to machines. He says:

I sometimes envision of a sort of endtime’ scenario: a point where Twitter would become a place where machines tweet and retweet to other machines, where machines welcome other machines by direct messages, where there is only occasionally (if any) human attention to reprogram the way in which the machines interact and alter the content the machines endlessly send to each other.

It made me think. What would be the use of Twitter if there were only bots on it. Why would bots tweet for other bots? Why would they retweet? If machines would not tweet 140 character messages, but data, it could actually have some use. For people, twitter can be used for information sharing. We find interesting information on the Web and post links on Twitter. Then our followers filter it and retweet what they find important and interesting in order to broadcast it further in the network. If Twitter were a network of machines instead of humans, machines could post updates of data they are hosting. Then other machines could see the updates; decide whether they concern them and “retweet” them for their fellow machines. This could be the way to filter the new data that appears on the Web and propagate the relevant one to the “interested” machines.

So, along with making Semantic Twitters, that semantify user-made tweets, building a Twitter for the Semantic Web could also make sense All we need is a vocabulary for describing dataset changes (something like this, this, this or this), and a common Twitter-like stream. Such a thing would certainly bring more light to the social life of machines