By now you’ve probably seen folks tweet some pretty stupid things, from credit card pics to vacations plans – all putting them at risk to be victimized.

Have you ever thought that tweeting about being bored at home could be just as ill-advised? Well, it is.
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You might be hard-pressed to find a more useless Twitter app than Twimon (in fact, that is a challenge). Twimom combines all the worst aspects of Twitter clients, Tamagatchi eggs and check-in services in one giant buggy ball of inanity. It’s as if someone decided they needed to come up with a way to get kids who aren’t interested in using Twitter at all to start tweeting.
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Maybe it’s not smartphone-enabled checkins that power this fun and informative Twitter app, but that doesn’t mean its version of “primitive geolocation” is any less sophisticated. With MapMyFollowers, you get a quick snapshot of where your followers live around the world, and access to some other interesting data too.

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Twitter has come a long, long way in 2009, maturing from a simple status updating service to a fully-fledged news broadcasting system that is as pivotal and informative to the global media as it is to the general public. The social network is now arguably the hottest thing on the internet as we move into the heady days of 2010.

As any network grows, it’s forced to change and adapt. Here are five predictions I’m making that we will see on Twitter in 2010.

Twitter Will Start To Become Profitable

Twitter’s deals with Microsoft and Google in 2009 mean that a good chunk of money is finally hitting their bank accounts. Other features they’ll add in 2010, including premium accounts for businesses (see below), improved metrics and a deeper (and billable) integration into television and other mainstream media, will ensure the pot never runs dry.

It won’t be huge in 2010, but I would expect $150-250m in profit by the end of the year.

(If they’re not making at least $100m in clear profit, my gut tells me they’ll be bought.)

The Difference Between Media And Social Media Will Continue To Blur

I’ve written about this in some detail before, and we already saw significant evidence of this in 2009, but as the newspaper industry is forced to adapt a ‘live or die’ attitude to survive the difference between old and social media will blur to a point of invisibility. Already many major newspapers (The Telepgraph, New York Times, The Guardian and, yes, amazingly, The Daily Mail) are seeing and capitalising on the value of internet-appealing editorials and reportage, be that in the form of using Twitter (and other networks) to break and share news first, or through good old-fashioned link bait.

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