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Twitter World

Oz — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 01:17:22 +0000

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.

Twitter Flutters With New Money

Oz — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 07:39:01 +0000

Twitter has been one of the most over hyped web 2.0 companies out there. They have failed to create anything that resembles a business model and have only convinced the technorati to be users. I wrote in earlier post that Twitter would be dead or bought in 2009.

Now Twitter is raising more money to keep afloat after turning down a rumored $500 million offer to be bought by Facebook. Twitter’s new valuation is $250 million and IVP has given them $20 million. This should keep the lights on a little longer as they try to scale their user base and find a business model. Erick Schonfeld of TechCruch, pointed out that Twitter’s user base is growing fast and by some metrics Twitter passed Digg in number of users. Regardless, Twitter is destined for the dead pool or it will get bought by either Facebook, Microsoft, or Google. There is nothing they have which is a real competitive advantage. Twitter is nothing more than a feature in someone else’s product.

Twitter Dead or Bought in 2009

Oz — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:16:01 +0000

Evan Williams, the god father of blogging, has really lost touch with reality. Tonight at the Churchhill Club in San Francisco he scoffed at criticisms that his company Twitter doesn’t have a business model. Rafe Needleman was there to quote Evan saying, “We will make money, and I can’t say exactly how because… we can’t predict how the businesses we’re in will work.” As he has before, he hinted at generating fees from sales-related Twitter content and from corporate users.

Does he realize its not 1999 or even 2003 when he sold Blogger to Google? Has he turned on CNBC to look at the economic carnage that is happening? Companies that have no business model like Twitter will soon be joining the deadpool or they will be begging Google or Microsoft to buy them. According to Techcrunch, Twitter has around 1 million vistors per month to their Web site and only 200K active users. That is about the size of the whole technorati population in San Francisco. Peanuts, compared to a service that is really mainstream. Twitter is really just a feature in a broader product offering. If Microsoft, Google, or Facebook come out with a similar offering Twitter is a dead man walking.