Nick Bilton, design integration editor and user interface specialist at The New York Times and The Times Research & Development Lab, thinks he’s hit upon a business model for Twitter. Writing for O’Reilly Radar, Bilton says:

“Twitter, potentially, has the ability to deliver unbelievably smart advertising; advertising that I actually want to see, and they have the ability to deliver search results far superior and more accurate to Google, putting Twitter in the running to beat Google in the latent quest to the semantic web. With some really intelligent data mining and cross pollination, they could give me ads that makes sense not for something I looked at 3 weeks ago, or a link my wife clicked on when she borrowed my laptop, but ads that are extremely relevant to ‘what I’m doing right now’.”

“And it doesn’t have to be advertising delivered on their site alone. One of the great successes of Twitter has been their APIs and the wonderful applications and sites that users have built with them. Why not build out an advertising or search API that delivers the latest micro level tags or ad links of users interests? There’s a plethora of opportunities with this data, and if it’s done right it becomes enticing and engaging, not annoying, irrelevant and outdated.”

Jeremiah Owyang’s distillation of HP Labs’ Twitter research touches on a related point:

“As we know, traditional advertising doesn’t work well in social networks, ‘carpet bombing’ isn’t effective. However, conversational marketing is also costly, as you have to spend great resources on labor to communicate with influencers. Therefore brands who want to be effective with their resources should find out who is an influencer in their market and focus their conversational marketing primarily on them.”

Mark Evans at Twitterrati, the recently launched blog about micro-blogging, highlights what he sees as a huge flaw in Bilton’s theory:

“While he may Tweet about where he works, what he reads, what his does for fun, what he’s looking to buy, and where he travels, not everyone provides this much information.

“Personally, I don’t use Twitter that way. I don’t use it as a digital diary, providing people with the nitty-gritty details of my personal and professional life. I figure no one is really interesting in what I had for breakfast or whether I’m thinking about going away. To me, it’s more of a resource and a tool to share ideas.”

Meanwhile at ReadWriteWeb, Bernard Lunn has discovered the power of Twitter’s real-time search:

“Most of the ‘Twitter-is-useful’ stories have centered on the social networking angle: people you know telling you where to get a great cup of coffee in a new city, for example. What was interesting about my usage was that the results did not come from my contacts. It was just like using Google search, but better.

Of course, this does not mean that Twitter search will replace Google. But this is the first time that I have used an alternative to Google for a general search term and found the alternative to be substantively, immediately better. That seems significant.”

Gmail adds task support
Staying with Google, one tool launch making headlines today is a Gmail-integrated to-do list called Tasks which is available via Google Labs. Announcing the launch, the Tasks team blogged:

“People use Gmail to get stuff done, so we’ve added a lightweight way to keep track of what you need to do, right from within Gmail.”

The response has been rather muted. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb hints at a personal problem with Gmail, writing:

“Gmail has been limping along for days, with scores of people reporting down time, super slow responsiveness and other troubles. With no communication from Google about the problem – what are users to think? Perhaps that we should put more of our lives in the hands of the Gmail team!

This afternoon the GMail team announced the addition of a new feature in the Gmail Labs – a Task Manager, or to do list. It’s quite an elegant little feature, when it and the rest of GMail work.”

Comments on the ReadWriteWeb post and Erick Schonfeld‘s coverage of the story in TechCrunch remind us that RememberTheMilk, one of the web-based to-do list managers that emerged a few years ago amid the hype over David Allen’s Getting Things Done personal productivity system, has integrated with Gmail (and other services) for ages.

On the Tasks launch, Schonfeld notes:

“But what’s missing—and I’m actually surprised at this oversight—is the ability to share or e-mail these lists. And when you add a due date, it doesn’t add the task to your Google Calendar or even give you that option. Maybe adding those features is something the Gmail team can put on its own to-do list.”