Twitter World

The Twitter phenomenon has been truly amazing. I wrote last year that I thought Twitter would be bought or dead in 2009. Well they are not bought or dead. Since then Twitter has been embraced by the media, celebrities, and any other narcissistic individual that wants to tell the world in 144 characters or less what they are doing. What is even more interesting is they still have not found a business model or solved their infrastructure problems. It is down so often that the Twitter fail whale should be their homepage.

I was recently at Web 2.0 and I heard Ev’s conversation with John Battelle. Not much has changed. He seemed very coy about his plans to figure out a business model or solve Twitter’s scalability issues. Even during his talk I could see several people in the audience getting the Twitter Fail Whale trying the access Twitter. But one of Ev’s problems might be solved sooner rather than later. The two search titans Microsoft and Google struck deals with Twitter to get access to its valuable real time data. Both Microsoft and Google most certainly had to pay for it. Sheryl Sandberg made it a point to say she didnt believe in charging for data. Early this year Ev closed another round of financing putting the total at $100 million with a whopping $1 billion valuation. With all this hype Twitter is seeing their growth plateau  and they are getting more and more competition from Facebook.