Is Twitter thinking too small?

I love Twitter. Use it everyday. Since way back in 2009, when the cool people in Silicon Valley were predicting Twitter's demise -- cause, you know, it was overrated and insular and so yesterday -- I had Twitter near the very top in my Technology Rankings. They remain there still.

Something called the New York Magazine has a great article on Twitter. Some quotes:

Behind the double doors, computer engineers, some 250 of them, Ph.D.’s from MIT and Stanford and Caltech, are busy trying to make order of the 200 million tweets a day, cascades of text messages from McCain, President Obama, and the pope; Justin Bieber and the Pakistani who heard U.S. commandos raid Osama bin Laden’s house; Kanye West and Hugo Chávez and the man who pretends to be Nick Nolte all day. Back there, in an attempt to solve the inherent paradoxes at the core of Twitter’s ambitions, computer algorithms are being developed to classify and assign values to every single tweet in the ever-chattering Rube Goldberg machine they created five years ago.

On computer monitors on floor three, they can watch TPS for an event spike like commodities on a trading desk. The freak earthquake in Virginia in August reached 5,500 TPS, a number released to the press as a significant barometer of impact: “More tweets than Osama bin Laden,” said the London Telegraph.

That compares to 5,530 TPS for the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Or 6,436 TPS for the 2011 BET Awards, and 5,531 for the NBA Finals. In August, the new Twitter record was set: 8,868 TPS for Beyoncé’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards.

“People describe Twitter as a global consciousness."

The ambition, and some of the rhetoric, is ­Gutenberg-size, though instead of ­Bibles, there’s Beyoncé. “There are nearly 7 billion people on this planet,” says Jack Dorsey, the company’s co-founder and original genius. “And we are building Twitter for all of them. They evolve, and so do we.”

Is that big enough? I don't think so. 

Why only Twitter for people? After all, those short, sharp, rarely shocking tweets per seconds by millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, soon possibly billions of persons are, frankly, limiting.

Why isn't my television tweeting? My home dehumidifier? The hybrid engine of my Honda? Why isn't my avatar, the one I use to buy possibly stolen merchandise via eBay, the one that is deliberately designed to *not* look like me, given his own Twitter?

One Twitter per person? That is so yesterday.