After my blitz trip through lima this past weekend it came to my attention that there is huge amount of underlying potential for the web in this part of the world, but its missing key components needed to grow. I spoke with a number of very intelligent and very in touch people who understand many of the changes going on in the social media and web2.0 sphere, and frankly came away with mixed emotions.

At my first South American Twitter meetup ever, over 40 people were there! Lots of people in this crowd were what we would call the early adopters here. Whereas in the US an early adopter of something like twitter is typically 6 months to a year ahead, there they are 2-3 years ahead of mainstream adoption. The main reason being that the infrastructure (SMS, Telecom, Internet) isn’t there for the majority of the population, and is still prohibitively expensive for many.

But here is what I see that made me really glad to have gone down to peru (from a developer/strategist perspective). There is a large group of people who are genuinely interested in these new emerging technologies, who have great skills in programming and development, and are really just waiting for a great project to come along. There isn’t the same entrepreneurial mindset there is here in the US, but there is a spirit of creativity. I spent hours talking to the talented team behind Prezentit about how to make the greatest twitter experience possible. How we could extend something as simple as the 140 characters of twitter and build a robust community around that social object.

Some of the things that Peru lacks from a web perspective: capital (not that much is needed, things are relatively cheap), someone with the balls to experiment on a number of things and put their $ where their mouth is, and people talking about the community as much as possible. The local paper El Comercio is doing a great job on this last part already (my visit is even mentioned here ) There are also a number of cultural issues that can be corrected, especially at the youth level (the same point where much of this development can occur).

I’ll write more in the future about south america and its role in this emerging global network of web development, software, and online culture. But for now I’d like to thank all my new twitter + facebook friends down there. Saludos a todos.

So this friday I will be meeting up with twitter users in Lima, Peru for BeerTwit. The concept of meeting up with virtual friends in real life is one that intrigues me, and I see it gaining lots and lots of steam in the near future. Its really amazed me that users are finding each other and connecting across disparate regions of the world and using the social bond that twitter provides them to connect in real life.

Apparently this trend is happening all around the world according to my friend Diego. Twitter meetups are sprouting up everywhere from Madrid, Mexico, Sevilla, Barcelona, Argentina, and tons of other places. Those are just the spanish speaking places too!

There is even a Tokyo twitter group! 2 seconds of quick searching also revealed meetups in Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Huntsville, Buffalo,  and Venice, Italy!

So if you know of a tweetup occuring, post them in the comments.

So you might be thinking, why on earth would this be a good deal for either party? How can two also-rans of the internet fit well together? How can they compete against the all mighty goog? Well this harks back to my theory on the evolution of advertising and the shift to behavioral advertising.

At the moment, Yahoo is probably the number one player in this field. AOL is distant second, but the two are definitely the leaders in this market. With a combined effort on their part, they can merge the patents and IP advantages they each posses and come out with some amazing ad solutions. AOL’s Platform A initiative is already strong, but what it really needs is the massive pageviews Yahoo! has. Yahoo’s behavioral targeting is good, but could benefit from some of the stuff AOL has + AOL’s extra pageviews, the social network they just bought (Bebo), and more.

What would Yahoo get out of buying/merging with AOL?

• Bebo - 3rd largest social network in the US and Europe
• Platform A/Advertising.com - One of the largest behavioral and display ad businesses on the net. Reach to millions of sites, which Yahoo! publisher network never was able to do (probably because they never accepted anyone!)
• Netscape - Still millions of browsers out there, tons of traffic.
• AOL Mail - LOTS of additional users to be migrated into the Y! Mail platform
• AOL dialup business - something they could quickly sell off to recoup some cash
• AOL Blog Network - these are a great fit for Y! content offerings. Esp. Y! Finance

What does AOL get from this deal?

• No more Time Warner! This has been a deal that dragged them down so far, its embarassing
• Stability - Y! has lots of cash on hand and TONS of traffic, and is less fickle than TW
• More reach - again Y! traffic
• LOTS of cost savings - data centers alone would be consolidated
• Cross promotion
• More data for their ad programs.

So to me this seems like a great fit, even if Microsoft does buy Yahoo, it would cost them another $20 Billion to get it done after an AOL merger. To me this seems like a great move, even if Y! does outsource the monetization of some of its search traffic to Google. I see them as a better fit together than Y! + MS.

What? Twitter can be a feature in my app? How can a web service like twitter be a function of my app?  If you look below the surface of twitter, it is a pure web service, and I mean service from an API perspective.  Lets keep that in mind as we explore this further.

So how can twitter the web service serve me in building my applications/sites/widgets? Well quite simply twitter gives us a truly portable social communications tool that is really, really flexible. Twitter should be seen as a support for your services to make them more portable and accessible.

So what do I mean by portable and accessible? Well first you need to cast away the notion that a website is only to be seen through one container (www.yourdomain.com for example). RSS, APIs, and a litany of other platforms should have changed your mind years ago.  Twitter gives you access to a number of things that are potentially useful for your endeavor:
Mobile Integration: A solid mobile platform (let them leverage the costs, last thing you need to do is pay $2k/month for an sms number + thousands in sms fees)
Jabber/IM Integration: Instant messaging based commands and controls (bots?)
Social Graph: A very flexible social graph and the ability to leverage relationships
Users: Roughly a million of them

The key to this is the ability to quickly and cheaply integrate mobile controls for your application, something no other platform is really offering at the moment.  Why not let your users post to and retrieve data from your site using their mobile phones? Why not let them interact with your application through instant messenger?  The possibilities are endless folks, you just have to look for them.