Twitter. Real time commerce. And hyperlocal space time.

Shopping, advertising, buying, selling are all on the cusp of radical change in process, form and design. The merger of real-time, the mobile web, smartphones, social media and infinitely scalable databases storing information on every product and every seller and every coupon will make this so.

I've written several times already that the iPad is the world's biggest store. As millions of us buy these (and soon, the Amazon Tablet, which the company must offer), we can buy, try, design, view, compare, have our avatar sample and in all other ways find a product or build a product and purchase that product. The iPad is a storefront. Think of it like that. To the world.

Oh, yeah, it's also a core Apple product leading to the purchase of all manner of digital content.

Tablets are different, in form and function, then smartphones. Our smartphones are always with us, always on, and enable real-time connection between location (physical) and data (virtual). With the growth of social media, these three vectors, crossing the physical, the digital and the social converge upon that which I have not developed a term for: call it, hyperlocal space-time. You are right here, right now, with all the information of the web and your friends collapsing into your smartphone, readily available to you.

This new reality, my friend, will lead to amazing innovation and likely trillions of dollars spent on getting YOU to BUY NOW HERE or YOU BUY THERE NOW, with appeals thrown in from friends, from those you follow, with a real-time, personalized 'story' on how the purchase will make you better.

With the iPhone, the iPad, iTunes, App Store and now Twitter, few copmanies are set up to take advantage of this new reality than Apple. Problem for them, of course, is they have no idea how to run an advertising platform, and they pretty much suck at building a workable recommendation engine. And they have no search engine. I mean, let's say you walk past a product in an aisle in anystore USA, and your smartphone knows you need/want a particular product, and you can be bombarded with deals and groupons, and you tap your social network to help you decide, and maybe point your smartphone at the item to get specs and have it automatically call up competing products, better prices, alternatives -- or 'score' why you should buy this thing. Or not. We are very quickly headed to that world. 

Sounds like something tailor-made for Google.

But, the combination of Apple and Twitter offer a viable alternative. And with Twitter baked into iOS 5, and Twitter's CEO talking about commerce, look for another new market for both Apple and Twitter to move into.

During a keynote interview at Fortune BrainstormTech in Aspen, [Twitter CEO Dick] Costolo was pressed about his company's business model. After discussing its various advertising options -- including its plans to eventually offer self-serve ads -- he mentioned how conference organizers and sports teams had used Twitter to find buyers for unsold inventory. For example, the San Diego Chargers were able to quickly sell around 1,000 tickets to a game that otherwise would have been blacked out on local television. Twitter itself didn't make any money on those transactions, but may look to do so in the future.

"There's a commerce opportunity there for us to take advantage of if we want," Costolo said. "How can we remove friction from the process?" He declined to explain exactly how Twitter might remove that friction -- or even that a plan was in place -- but did suggest that the Chargers could have sold their tickets even more efficiently were buyers not forced to visit an entirely different website to make their purchase.