Twitter Takes Step Toward Commercial Accounts

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/24/twitter-takes-a-step-toward-commercial-accounts/?hp

by physcab • 17 years ago

17 13 17 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

crcoffey2• 17 years ago

It's still blows my mind in exactly how popular Twitter has become.

theklub• 17 years ago

Consider how much publicity they get.

crcoffey2• 17 years ago

But thats my point. Why?

Twitters entire concept is just a head spin, As a casual bystander to the twit phase, I gather that 90% of the posts are either ego trips, basic daily occurrences, spam or marketing.

Why can't you meet your friends for coffee instead of twittering them about it from Starbucks.

P.S: Sent from my iphone.

sfphotoarts2• 17 years ago

Also consider that it provides a 'service' that people want and/or enjoy.

The internet has changed, it was born as a means to share physics data, quickly it grew to provide services that made our lives easier/better (online banking, wikipedia, search, photo sharing, travel, real-estate, the list goes on and on..) Then, another change happened.

The internet passed the point of making real-world services more efficient, and social activities became prevalent.

Successful apps no longer need to be useful in any way, it's enough that they are fun, or help you vent, or provide a way to reach more people, to express, or in essence to be human. The wonderful thing is that the tools to make these new applications have also matured and become easy enough that a small number of people (as small as 1) can build something that is used by millions.

Remember the days when you needed a team of ops people and c programmers to deal with networking and file systems and all that nonsense. Now you can deploy a web app with very little code and very little skill? This is a wonderful thing.

It doesn't matter if you like Twitter or not, its something that a lot of other people do like and the wonderful thing about the internet is that there is room for everyone. (well, with ip6 there is :)

RyanMcGreal3• 17 years ago

It's a little mysterious how Twitter manages to stay in business now, given that they don't seem to charge anyone for anything.

nir2• 17 years ago

They're in business with the money they raised. The fact that putting up a few content pages nets them an NY Times story probably doesn't hurt attracting further investment..

RyanMcGreal3• 17 years ago

Yes, that's what makes me nervous. I remember back in 1999 listening to a startup CFO saying her company was having cash-flow problems and needed more VC funding, and thinking that what they really needed was a revenue stream. (That was when I realized with a clunk that the dot com bubble's days were numbered.)

Twitter has been remarkably successful at attracting a huge community of users and developers for their service, but sooner or later they're going to have to find a way to monetize that - without alienating the huge user base on which any viable monetizing plan must depend.

sfphotoarts2• 17 years ago

It's called Venture Capital, and they have a lot of it.

skolor• 17 years ago

It would not (entirely) surprise me to see a large portion of their business model coming from data-sets. Back at the end of 2008, an individual gathered every single Tweet that had been made to that point, simply by trying every possible Tweet-ID. He released the data-set, and promptly took it down, because the Twitter staff had contacted him. They apparently were in talks, and I never did see the end result. Here is the blog post on it: http://blog.infochimps.org/2008/12/29/massive-scrape-of-twit...

He collected 10 million Tweets, which was a side-effect when trying to gather a graph of user-following, and got permission from Twitter staff to release it, after which they changed their mind. Its rather disapointing, and would have been a great corpus to do work on.

Either way, I think Twitter could develop a significant profit-stream by bringing in some stats staff, and running analysis on their end against the databases. If Twitter really does want to become "the heartbeat of the internet" or whatever they called it, that's the way to monetize it.

Twitter Takes Step Toward Commercial Accounts

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