I read somewhere that applications and new technology don’t take off unless they have a “killer application” or a “killer app.”  For twitter, you’d think the fact that news usually breaks first on there, or that the first pictures from just about any big news event show up on twitter first (remember the plane in the Hudson?). You’d think that news delivery would be Twitter’s killer app.

You’d be wrong.

Follow me down this path for a moment…

I was thinking about the fact that there are pornographers on Twitter. To me, it indicates that Twitter appears to be hitting it big enough that pornographers have decided to take a look at it for promotional purposes.  I’m not going to get into a moral and philosophical debate about porn. What I will say, is that people know where to go for porn on the internet. The porn doesn’t need to come find people, people will go out and find it when they want it.

Everyday, I have a few new followers that all have a similar profile, with identical tweets on them, and they all point back to some site where I can see someone’s “naughty pictures” or whatever.  Invariably, these profiles always have a few hundred followers. I don’t follow these profiles back, but other people are and do. Unfortunately, because of Twitter’s open nature it’s hard to get away from the pornographers.

That’s when it hit me.

Twitter’s killer app, in my opinion, is its ability to connect like minded people together. People usually follow people and topics that they are interested in. It’s never just a willy nilly follow everyone under the sun free for all. There are people that do that, but I think that for the majority of people, they want to follow people or topics that they’re interested in.

Like minded people connecting with each other. That’s the killer app.